“With Scintilla, you can go from I think to I know”
Christine Rearick of Fruit of the Earth on how Scintilla can help suppliers save time and speak the same language as their merchants.
We recently sat down with Christine Rearick of Fruit of the Earth for a conversation about Scintilla. Here’s what she shared with us about unifying data sources, gaining back lost time, and how some of the most valuable insights come directly from customers.
Hi, Christine. What do you do over at Fruit of the Earth?
I'm a Jane of all trades. I do analytics, sales, anything that's necessary.
That's a lot of hats to wear. Do you use Scintilla to help with analytics?
Yes, we've been using Scintilla for almost 2 years.
How has that been going?
I have to be honest, for the first year, we were not using it as much as we could have or should have. There were a lot of things that we didn't understand. But now we use it every single day.
What led to that change?
Office hours. When I'm there with our Scintilla support team and I ask how to figure out a problem, they go, “Oh, no problem, just go to this report. We'll walk you through it, and we'll help you build custom data sets so you get the best performance possible.”
With all the roles you're juggling, I'm sure the support is welcome.
Yes, Sarah and Shelby from our Scintilla team are amazing. They're like an extension of our team.
How else has Scintilla changed since you started using it?
Scintilla has evolved so much that we're always so excited to find out what the next new thing is because it's helping us grow our business at Walmart.
I feel like the interface has gotten much easier to use. And the folks at Walmart Data Ventures listen to our questions. Just two weeks ago, I asked the Scintilla team, "When I open my Insights Dashboard and I see that performance is trending up or down, how do I know how that compares to the rest of the category?" And it wasn't even two days later that that data was added to the dashboard.
I mean, they're listening. They understand why we want to look at those metrics and they implement based on feedback directly from suppliers, and that's pretty awesome.
Has Scintilla changed how you work at all?
Scintilla allows us to be a lot more efficient. If I see something that doesn't look right, I can usually get to the answer within 15 minutes.
Before Scintilla, we used data from different places, including syndicated data. I always had to look in this system and that system and piecemeal all of them back together. And that's after waiting a month for syndicated data to update.
With Scintilla, I log in and my dashboard's right there. I can get a temperature check at any time. We can even join Scintilla to our data tables, so we can get all of the attributes and metrics we need to measure our business and make the output more audience-focused.
We have even reallocated some of our spending and put it toward Scintilla instead, so we got to go back to leadership and say, "Hey, look, we're going to get all of this information directly from Walmart's system."
Sounds like a pretty big shift in your workflow. Where have you felt the impact the most?
Scintilla has been vital when walking into line reviews. There was a time when preparing for a line review meant you'd spend two days downloading all of your syndicated data and scrubbing it before you could even start using it. We spent a lot of nights mining data until 1:30 a.m.
Now we're able to efficiently access the data and utilize it. And we went from spending five or six days prepping for a line review to being able to knock it out in a day and a half. Scintilla has allowed me to be a lot more efficient from a business perspective, but it's given me part of my personal life back too.
It must also be helpful to know that you're using the same data as your merchant.
Absolutely. At the front of our minds, we're trying to keep track not only of what the consumer is telling us, but what our merchant is going to need to know and how we can help them understand what's happening within the market. Scintilla has levelled the playing field. Suppliers have been enabled to get to the same insights as category advisors. From a research and analysis perspective, that's a big deal.
Do you use any Scintilla modules more than the others?
Customer Perception. As we know, the customer is number one, always, and we can use Customer Perception to ask them things like, "Why did you purchase? What do you love about it? What do you wish it had that it doesn't have today?" Getting that feedback and ensuring that we're making products that make their lives better is very, very important to us.
Us too. How has your experience been with creating surveys in Customer Perception?
The process for the surveys has been so easy. And we have support directly from the Research Services team at Scintilla, who do a fantastic job of saying, "Perhaps you could word it like this or like that, so you can move the customer along to the next question or qualify them."
It's a lot of fun, too. The Walmart Customer Spark community is so excited to tell you what they think. And I think that they understand that their voice matters, and that's important to us as well.
How do you use the survey responses you get?
We're using feedback from customers to better understand which direction to go in, what they're looking for, if they're happy with the products that we have today—basically how we can really excite customers.
Customers will say, "I like this product, but I wish it was a little bit more like this." And we can take that feedback to our product development team and say, "This is exactly what the customer told us they want."
Having that direct line to the customer's voice is priceless, and it's actually aiding in product development. So we'll have new news to share in the future about products that we're now developing based on feedback directly from the consumer.
What would you tell other suppliers who might be on the fence about Scintilla?
I would say that if you're not taking the time to dig in and use it, you are really, really missing out on the ability to totally wrap your arms around a business. You should always know what your merchant knows and nothing should ever be a surprise to either of you. So dig into the data, attend your office hours, talk to your team. They want you to be successful. The answers are all there.
And how would you describe Scintilla in just one word?
Necessary. Vital. Insightful.
Whoa, that's a lot more than one.
I could go on! It's efficient. It's fact-based. You're moving from an "I think" state to an "I know" state. If you're not using Scintilla, you're not going to reach your full potential.
Any parting thoughts?
I just think it's so important for everyone to understand that Scintilla isn't just about growing and managing your business. There is an entire team behind every supplier supporting us every step of the way. And we'll never see them. We'll never know their names, but they're the ones behind the scenes that are doing the work. So to them, I would give a huge thank you and the biggest hug. You guys are amazing.
Want to see how Scintilla can help you grow your business at Walmart?
Learn more
©2026 Walmart Inc. All rights reserved.
