100× Faster Pricing at Connecticut’s Crown Market

About

The Crown Market, an iconic grocery in West Hartford, Connecticut, has served the community since 1940. Now run by a new ownership team led by Debra & Khen Raviv, the store still draws customers for its fresh deli, bakery, and hard-to-find staples—earning a 4.6-star Google rating from nearly 400 reviewers. Eight decades of trust built the brand; modern efficiency is what will keep it thriving for the next eighty.

Challenge

The Crown’s shelves turn over hundreds of SKUs every week, but until recently every price change was keyed in by hand.

• Price updates took hours. Staff combed through vendor invoices line-by-line and re-entered new costs in the POS—often days after the goods were already on sale.
• Double entry drained morale. The same invoices had to be scanned, renamed, and emailed to an outside accountant, adding another tedious pass through identical data.
• Margins and cash flow suffered. By the time new costs reached the POS, prices on high-velocity items were already out of date—leaving profit on the table and eroding confidence in the numbers.

“Keeping our POS updated was a never ending challenge. I invested endless time and we never felt like our margins were perfectly updated”

- Mike Hanson, General Manager, The Crown

Solution

Real-Time Cost Control with Supplyve

When the team rolled out Supplyve, the drudgery vanished almost overnight. Invoices now land in a dedicated flow straight into Supplyve’s AI parser. Every line item—SKU, pack size, cost—is mapped to and tracked to the correct product in Crown’s POS. SKUs whose new costs drop below The Crown’s target margin are automatically changed. Approved cost updates now can be published to the POS in minutes, not hours, and the same invoice data flows to QuickBooks without human intervention—eliminating duplicate data entry.

Results

The Crown Market’s back-office routine transformed from a weekly slog into a quick coffee-break check-in:

• Cost updates now take under 30 minutes a week, not half a workday—roughly 100× faster.
• Duplicate data entry is gone. Automatic QuickBooks sync saves about 1,300 staff hours per year and eliminates typo-driven headaches.
• Margins stay protected in real time. Prices move the same day costs change, preserving profit on every fast-moving SKU.
• Freed-up employees focus on customers, launching pop-up tastings and better end-cap displays that lift in-store sales.