When Ashley Oien took on inventory management as part of her role as Senior Director of Demand Planning at Rise Baking Company, she inherited a problem that had been compounding for over a decade.
Rise Baking, like so many other CPGs, grows primarily through acquisition. For Rise Baking, ten acquisitions since 2013 added manufacturing capacity, warehouse space, and — critically — its own way of handling distressed inventory. At some acquired companies, the supply chain manager decided what happened to stranded product. At others, that responsibility sat with the warehouse manager, customer service, the quality department, or the supply chain planner. ERP systems varied by division, as did the processes for flagging, identifying, and segregating excess inventory. At the corporate level, no single system or workflow connected these functions.
The result was a secondary sales operation that was reactive by default. Rise had about fifteen value channel buyers. Selling happened through emails and spreadsheets, with no standardized bidding process and no centralized reporting. About 15% of identified excess inventory actually found a buyer, and that other 85% went to disposal — pig farms, landfill, total loss.
"The distressed sales process was really disorganized," Ashley said during a webinar with Jeff Love, Spoiler Alert's VP of Product. "And identified a need for a centralized, digitalized system for Rise at the corporate level."
The goals were clear before the solution was
Ashley knew what she wanted to fix before she knew how she would fix it:
• A centralized, corporate-level inventory management program that spanned all of Rise's sites
• Reduced write-offs and throwaway
• Proactive identification of aging inventory — because, as she put it, why wait to sell something if you already know today that there's no future demand for it?
• Storage savings from moving product sooner
• Improved margin recovery
• Cleaner financial books
• Freed warehouse space
• Reduced inventory reserve risk
That last point carries particular weight at Rise. As a private equity-backed company, cash flow is everything, and excess inventory sitting in warehouses represents non-performing assets tying up working capital. Every day a product ages without a disposition plan, the balance sheet takes the hit. That left a ticking clock on finding the right solution.
From discovery to live
Ashley first encountered Spoiler Alert in February 2025. By March, she had a demo. The business case started in April, paused for competing priorities over the spring, and closed in July. Contract signed in August. Everything was live in September.
She moved fast because the platform was built to let her. Spoiler Alert's reporting functionality was already in place: the standardized bidding workflow, negotiation tools, and dashboards were ready out of the box.
And with Spoiler Alert’s Managed Marketplace, Rise gained immediate access to over a hundred verified value channel buyers without the back-and-forth of onboarding a single new customer into their ERP system. Instead, Rise set parameters on their exact standards, what they needed to ship, and Spoiler Alert matched product to demand with new offers. All without compromising on brand equity.
That last point matters most. Rise is dedicated to protecting its customers' brands, and Managed Marketplace gave Rise access to curated, vetted buyers while maintaining full control over and visibility into who was purchasing their product. Ashley said there was no concern about brand protection — the vetting process and transparency built into the marketplace gave her team the confidence they needed to move product through the network.
"We expanded our customers from fifteen and added an additional seventy new vetted, verified buyers. This really increased the volume that we're able to sell in the secondary market." – Ashley Oien, Senior Director, Demand Planning
What eight selling cycles have changed
In just six months after going live, Rise had completed eight full selling cycles on Spoiler Alert and increased the cadence from monthly to bimonthly. Ashley said the platform felt comfortable after the second or third cycle, and the financial returns showed up immediately:
• $60,000 in storage cost savings in the first four months, at an assumed rate of $18 per pallet per month
• 18% improvement in margin recovery
• 2x monthly secondary market sales volume
• Near-total cost avoidance — because the vast majority of that inventory had previously gone to disposal, Ashley described much of the recovered revenue as net-new recovery against what would have been a total loss
But the numbers only tell part of the story. Rather than just changing how surplus inventory gets sold, Spoiler Alert changed how the organization thinks about surplus inventory in the first place. Internal teams now respond faster because they know there is a live secondary channel waiting.
5,000 cases of stranded pie
That shift showed up in a tangible way when Rise lost a customer on an unbaked pie SKU and found themselves suddenly holding over 5,000 cases of obsolete inventory with nowhere to go.
Before Spoiler Alert, addressing unplanned excess meant falling back on familiar reactive measures: internal emails, ad hoc sales meetings, and the organizational fire drills.
Instead, they posted the inventory on Spoiler Alert, and, within two selling cycles, found three buyers to purchase the entire lot. One of those buyers even came back as a repeat customer from the first cycle.
This is the crux of what Managed Marketplace solves. Rise didn't need to onboard those new buyers into their ERP system, chase down vendor setup paperwork, or manage order-to-cash reconciliation. The marketplace handled that overhead, and the product moved – all without sacrificing brand equity, as Rise maintained complete control of where those pies ended up.
Where Rise is heading
The program is already expanding. Rise has begun posting a wider variety of SKUs, like dry mixes, on the platform, and stakeholders across the business are asking if more could follow. The program is also driving questions upstream, such as analyses into why excess inventory exists in the first place, feeding insights back into demand planning and production decisions.
Ashley's sustainability stance was one of the most direct moments in the webinar. "If food is fit for human consumption, food should never be tossed, period," she said. Her priority hierarchy is clear: sell first, donate second, find alternative uses like energy credit or animal feed third, and dispose only as a last resort. Her next focus is expanding donation pathways for inventory that doesn't find a buyer on the platform.
Eight cycles in, Rise Baking has replaced a fragmented, email-driven fifteen-buyer process with a centralized, data-driven program — and one that now reaches four times as many vetted buyers and continues to scale.
"[Spoiler Alert] reduces waste, increases sales, and improves your overall inventory health." – Ashley Oien, Senior Director, Demand Planning
Want to learn more about how Managed Marketplace can match your inventory to the right buyers at the right price? See Ashley share her own experience in the webinar.
