Channel-Level Profitability for Retail
How does De Pindakaaswinkel (The Peanut Butter Store) steer true profitability across channels while protecting margins and preserving a brand built on taste, sustainability, and inclusivity?
Challenge
Protect margin while scaling a specialty retail flywheel across stores, pop-ups, e-commerce, and B2B, so leadership can act early on margin leakage, even when high revenue looks healthy when store or product economics are declining.
Solution
One integrated, multi-dimensional profitability model that applies the same financial logic to reveal margin performance per channel, product, peanut butter flavor, and location.
Benefits
Early visibility into unprofitable stores and products, improved margin control across channels, and a fact-based foundation for sustainable growth in specialty retail.
About De Pindakaaswinkel
Started in Michiel Vos’ kitchen table in 2014 with a simple ambition: to make the world’s tastiest, most sustainable peanut butter. It quickly grew into a global specialty brand with 11 stores, pop-ups, online, and B2B sales.
It’s not just a playful identity with unconventional flavors, it’s also a mission driven enterprise – using 88% peanuts from high-wage, no-tillage farms in Argentina, palm oil-free and protein-rich. That same care extends to hiring people from all psychological backgrounds and partnering with schools to run student-led stores, all without compromising on quality.
With no funding and supermarket shelf space, De Pindakaaswinkel has proven balancing mission with margin in an omnichannel environment is possible.
Still high-street rents, rising wages, inflation, and raw material costs put constant pressure on the business. For years, Michiel only looked in to the current account and went by instinct. As he puts it: Retail is a beautiful but brutal game. Growth only works if costs stay under control and chose to turn to fact-based cost steering.
For us two things are important: margin and growth, in that order.
Michiel Vos, Founder and CEO
De Pindakaaswinkel
Profit decisions under omnichannel complexity
Primary challenge:
How can De Pindakaaswinkel steer profitability across stores, online, and B2B when the same jar carries materially different cost-to-serve burdens by channel and location?
No cost transparency across sales channels
Revenue was visible, but the full cost picture was fragmented. Store economics depended on rent, building costs, and personnel. Online economics depended on marketing and fulfillment. Without an integrated view, leadership could not see where value was created, and where margin quietly leaked. Decision-making was defaulted to instinct.
Revenue did not equal margin at location and product level
The team learned that best sellers were not always best earners. Jars were roughly similar to produce, yet profitability varied sharply by flavor and sales route. Some high-revenue stores looked successful until location-level cost allocation revealed margin pressure. A strong location could be margin negative. In several cases, unprofitability became clear too late and the decision window had passed.
Insight arrived too late to act
Retail volatility, wage pressure, and prime-location rent dynamics made late insight expensive. In some cases, stores were recognized as unprofitable only after the decision window had passed, increasing the cost of correction.
One integrated profitability model across channels
De Pindakaaswinkel with CostPerform to apply one multi-dimensional model with the same financial logic across stores, Shopify, and B2B, while still reflecting channel-specific cost drivers. Teams could compare performance fairly and see where value was created.
True profitability beyond sales volume
Profitability became visible at the level where retail decisions are made. The model showed that similar production costs can still create different margins once channel and location burdens are applied. The same product could be financially strong in one channel and weak in another. Eg. Same jar, same price, different unit cost by store. It also highlighted when a popular flavor carried higher cost but insufficient margin, to justify its sales mix without adjustment.
Location-level insights delivered in decision-ready dashboards
CostPerform mapped profitability by store, proving that high revenue can still underperform on margin once rent and personnel are correctly allocated. Insights were operationalized in a Power BI dashboard built for ongoing steering, giving leadership visibility into store-level margin outcomes, channel performance, and geographic customer demand patterns.
Shift from reporting to steering power: This turned profitability into a daily management instrument, enabling earlier interventions, renegotiation triggers, and clearer network pruning decisions tied to margin and growth priorities.
De Pindakaaswinkel and CostPerform
A single profitability view that connects channel, product, flavor, and location economics using consistent allocation logic.Â
Leaders can now compare performance with confidence and steer decisions with evidence.
Omnichannel retail economics, made steerable
One model, consistent logic
De Pindakaaswinkel aligned store, online, and B2B economics into one profitability view, enabling like-for-like performance comparison across locations, products, and flavors.
Faster intervention on margin leakage
Management can see where margin drops, understand what drives it, and act on staffing, rent burden, pricing, or assortment before losses build up.
Scalable playbook for enterprise retail
CostPerform helped turn a specialty brand into repeatable profit control, giving large retailers a clear way to improve omnichannel margins without slowing innovation.
About CostPerform
Crafted over 20+ years by econometrists and cost experts, CostPerform is the solution for defining, designing and maintaining your cost and profitability model. Any mathematical approach of cost allocation you can think of, is possible.
From insurance companies and merchant banks to central banks: CostPerform is used by financial institutions to determine profitability, report to regulators and to simulate future business models.Â
Contact us today to get insights into which products, customers, channels or transactions make you the most money, by allocating the associated costs.