How Miss Jones Baking Co. Improved Gross Margin by 1.1% Without Adding Headcount

How Miss Jones Baking Co. Improved Gross Margin by 1.1% Without Adding Headcount

Miss Jones Baking Co. is a CPG food brand with tens of millions in annual gross sales. Before Glimpse, they were paying $3,000–$4,000 a month for a contractor to manage their deductions, disputing only claims above $500. Since onboarding with Glimpse in late 2025, Miss Jones has recovered a six-figure sum in invalid deductions — including a $22,943.83 single Walmart shortage win — improving gross margin by 1.1% and reducing trade spend rate by 1.2% in a single quarter, at the same monthly cost as their manual approach.

About Miss Jones Baking Co.

Miss Jones Baking Co. is a consumer packaged goods company with a portfolio of branded and private label food products distributed nationally through UNFI and KeHE and sold through major retailers including Walmart. The company operates with a lean finance team, CFO Joanna Rodriguez and Controller Laura Vanderschaaf, managing an increasingly complex deduction workload as the portfolio expands into Target and the dollar channel.

The Challenge: Manual Deduction Management Doesn't Scale

Miss Jones handled deductions the way most growing CPG brands do: an outsourced contractor logging into each distributor portal individually, pulling backup documentation, and tracking outcomes in a Google Sheet. The work consumed an estimated 15 hours a week, entirely dependent on one person, across UNFI, KeHE, and Walmart, each with its own portal, timeline, and documentation requirements.

"Death by a Million Cuts"

Manual processes default to thresholds. When a human is filing each dispute individually, the ROI math breaks down for smaller claims. Filing a dispute on a $40 deduction can cost more in labor than you'd recover. So brands set a floor, write off everything below it, and move on.

We all know that we get killed with all the little stuff adding up. It's death by a million cuts.
‍
Joanna Rodriguez
CFO of Miss Jones Baking Co.

When Glimpse audited Miss Jones's deduction history at onboarding, they found $40,000 in undisputed, invalid deductions under $50 and $80,000 under $200 from KeHE and UNFI in a single year. AI changes the math: Glimpse has no marginal cost per dispute, so the floor disappears entirely.

When Walmart Became the Breaking Point

In late 2024, a single Walmart holiday purchase order generated approximately $500,000 in short-pay chargebacks, the largest single-event deduction episode in company history.

"Really, the big piece was that Walmart is a growing part of our business, and we were getting a significant amount of sometimes substantial deductions from Walmart," said Laura Vanderschaaf, Controller at Miss Jones. 

The Solution: Automation With a Human Expert Layer

Glimpse replaced the manual workflow entirely. AI agents ingest deductions automatically, classify each line item to the correct GL account, validate claims against trade agreements and BOL documentation, and file disputes directly. 

Across the engagement, Glimpse processed more than 8,343 deductions representing $3.63 million in deduction value. The prior process required an estimated 15 hours a week of contractor time.

The deduction side, honestly, I spend very little time on it now. Which has been amazing.

Laura Vanderschaaf
Financial Controller at Miss Jones Baking Co.

The platform also works alongside a team of experienced deduction specialists who handle multi-round Walmart submissions, escalate contested claims, and identify what's driving deduction spikes. Vanderschaaf shared, "One of the reasons we really looked at Glimpse is that, while a lot of it is AI, there is a person working on our account as well, someone who's really knowledgeable in the dispute process."

When Walmart was deducting an inflated spoils allowance because the underlying trade agreement hadn't been updated, Glimpse filed a dispute knowing it would be denied and used the denial letter to compel the agreement correction.

The Results

The largest single win on the Miss Jones account to date, $22,943.83 from a single Walmart shortage claim, was recovered alongside $9,118.65 across six additional Walmart shortage claims in a single week. Since onboarding, Miss Jones has recovered six figures across thousands of filed claims, improving gross margin by 1.1% and reducing trade spend rate by 1.2% in a single quarter.

Recovered Dollars Reinvested into Growth

Every dollar won back through a dispute is a dollar that didn't exist in the forecast.

"Those dollars that are being recovered directly offset our trade spend," said Rodriguez. "If we're finalizing our forecast and we see that we're coming in ahead of plan. Say there's $100,000 available. We could go invest that in promotions, marketing, or new headcount. It basically gives us those dollars to work with."

A Win That Doesn't Show Up in the Dispute Total

Glimpse's look-back analysis surfaced a systemic billing issue: UNFI had been double-dipping on off-invoice deductions across two separate accounting periods, taking the same deduction twice and collecting from Miss Jones both times. This kind of error never gets disputed. It compounds and erodes margin in amounts small enough to miss individually. Catching it required reviewing deduction history across hundreds of line items simultaneously, a pattern no human-managed process would surface.

The ROI

Miss Jones was paying $3,000–$4,000 per month for a contractor handling disputes manually. This cost didn't account for at least $80,000 in annual deductions written off because they fell below the threshold. Miss Jones's subscription with Glimpse runs at $3,000 per month with no dispute threshold.

I definitely feel that [Glimpse] is paying for itself. We posed it to the team early on. Can we actually save money using software and AI?

Joanna Rodriguez
CFO at Miss Jones Baking Co.

Looking Ahead

Miss Jones is growing fast, with Walmart continuing to drive a significant share of revenue and the portfolio expanding into Target and the dollar channel. Each new retail partner brings new deduction categories, portals, and dispute rules. 

A manual process can only absorb this complexity by adding more people or more hours, which means the operational cost of managing deductions scales with revenue, eating into the margin that growth was supposed to create.

Glimpse absorbs that complexity automatically, so Miss Jones can add retail partners without adding headcount.

Miss Jones has renewed for the long term.

Having disputes on autopilot and being able to have visibility into the size, the status, the dollars, the win rate — having all of those statistics at your fingertips in the portal has fundamentally changed our business.

Joanna Rodriguez
CFO at Miss Jones Baking Co.

Rodriguez hasn't kept the results to herself. "I've already told everybody in the Naturally Colorado CFO forum about Glimpse and the success we've had with it," she said.

At Miss Jones's onboarding audit, Glimpse found $120,000 in invalid deductions sitting unclaimed. Start with a deduction audit to see what's in yours.

Book a call here: https://www.tryglimpse.com/contact

About Glimpse

Glimpse is an AI-powered deduction management platform built for CPG brands selling through distributors and major retailers. Glimpse automates the entire process — from deduction coding and validation to dispute resolution — using AI agents trained on distributor and retailer-specific rules. Backed by a team of experienced deduction specialists, Glimpse helps finance and AR teams recover invalid deductions, eliminate manual work, and improve bottom-line performance without adding headcount. Glimpse processes over $1 billion in invoice volume and maintains a 91% dispute win rate across the platform.