Meet Alakai: Post-Event Analysis for CPG Commercial Teams
Every trade promotion should
make the next one better
Trade spend is 25% of your gross revenue, but post-event analysis for CPG trade promotions is getting roughly 1% of your company’s attention.
Most enterprise CPG commercial teams can’t consistently say whether last quarter’s promotions made money, lost it, or just moved volume from one week to the next. Even with hundreds of analysts, nine-figure trade budgets, and entire RGM functions, most teams can’t answer the most basic question in trade: did it drive incremental sales and profit?
Trade spend ROI measurement in CPG has been broken long enough that most organizations have just accepted it as the cost of doing business. But Alakai’s founder, Cam Lizenby, saw this as a critical problem he could fix.
Meet Cam Lizenby, Founder & CEO of Alakai
Cam Lizenby spent a decade in CPG analytics before founding Alakai. He started as a BI consultant working with Unilever, Reckitt Benckiser, and Smithfield, then spent six years inside Kellogg’s Revenue Growth Management team—ultimately leading a 25-person cross-functional team spanning RGM, data science, and external vendors.
While working on revenue growth management analytics at Kellogg’s, Cam built the tools his own CPG commercial teams relied on:
- A post-event analysis library that replaced a third-party solution and saved $500K annually.
- A pricing simulation suite that supported the largest pricing actions in Kellogg’s history.
- A profit pool visibility tool that connected manufacturer and retailer financials in one place.
Cam learned that most CPG insight and analytics investments were spent in the wrong places: manual data collection, building in-house tools or reports, and hiring more people to interpret dashboards.
He understood that operationalizing commercial insights was critical to driving ROI. That meant CPG commercial teams needed to improve their promotion tactics, catch competitor moves early, and easily identify where internal TPM data differed from what actually ran on the shelf.
Cam built Alakai—an automated, AI-powered commercial data platform for CPG trade promotion analysis—to give every CPG commercial team the answers they need to operationalize trade promotion insights.
The post-event analysis gaps costing
CPG manufacturers millions every year
The CPG post-event analysis challenges most organizations face are structural. Trade promotion analyses are done manually and inconsistently, weeks after the window to act has closed. Sales teams repeat the same promotions because no one can definitively tell them which ones work and which ones don’t.
Simply put: the data exists, but the infrastructure to pull it together fast enough to matter doesn’t.
It wasn’t until a competitor repositioned their package sizes that Cameron and his team felt the full weight of that problem. The competitor’s packaging change was in front of shoppers for eight months before the Kellogg’s team noticed. Meanwhile, Kellogg’s ran their plans the same way they always had, unaware they were being outpositioned.
For one of the world’s largest cereal manufacturers, the loss was staggering.
6-7 lost dollar share points.
This moment inspired Cam to build a commercial data platform for CPG Trade Promotion Analysis that closes the gap between the existing data and the answers teams can’t surface.
Alakai is the only solution that gives your entire commercial team the data they need to catch competitive moves early, comprehensively evaluate promotions, and plan quickly using current insights.
Automated post-event analysis built
for how commercial CPG teams actually work
Most AI projects within enterprise CPG manufacturers are top-down, scoped with too many unnecessary features, and cost way more than projected. By the time these tools end up in the hands of internal users (if they’re built at all), the sales and RGM teams rarely adopt them.
When he left Kellogg’s in 2023, Cam spent two years building AI tools that started with the data layer instead of a feature list. He ran every build through the same filters:
- Will a sales rep or RGM director actually use this?
- Does it give them something they can act on today?
These questions also shaped what Alakai is not. Traditional Trade Performance Management (TPM) tools ask your commercial team to trust predictive models without accounting for your team’s intrinsic knowledge and contextual awareness.
Alakai is built as a CPG commercial data platform first: one that gives you timely, account-specific insights that eliminate analysis paralysis so you can continuously improve your future promotion plans. Our goal is to help your organization beat your sales budget goals and win with retailers and shoppers.
The path to building Alakai
Cam built commercial analytics and promotion solutions for CPG clients, including Unilever, Reckitt Benckiser, and Smithfield. This included restructuring Smithfield’s $2M promotion spend into their first omnichannel redemption program.
After joining Kellogg’s Revenue Growth Management team, Cam progressed from Analyst to Manager. He owned the commercial strategy for the Balanced-Led Cereal portfolio and identified $16–20M in retailer margin transfers that directly informed Kellogg’s customer negotiation strategy.
As a Senior Manager on the Kellogg’s RGM team, Cam led a 25-person cross-functional team and built the company’s internal post-event analysis infrastructure. This tool replaced a third-party solution, saving $500K annually and supporting the largest pricing actions in Kellogg’s history.
Cam left Kellogg’s to build Alakai, applying a decade of hands-on RGM and commercial analytics experience to the problem he’d lived firsthand: commercial teams buried in data but lacking timely, actionable insight. Alakai launched in September 2024 with a Competitive Price Pack Architecture agent, expanding by year-end to include trade promotion validation and post-event insights.
Alakai was rebuilt for secure enterprise integration by mid-2025. Its first-party retail data platform was launched in early 2026, allowing Alakai to deliver teams a commercial source of truth that connects manufacturer TPM and syndicated data with real-time retail intelligence across every major account.
See what your teams can do with
true trade promotion data integration
The fastest way to understand what Alakai does for your commercial organization is to see it in action.
