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Customer video: Vallarta Supermarkets

May 23, 2025 • 3 min

Vallarta Supermarkets is a regional grocery retailer based in Los Angeles, California. It specializes in Hispanic and Latin American foods and serves customers through 60+ stores across the state. David Hinojosa, Vallarta COO, discusses the company’s growth and how RELEX is helping them utilize data for store floor planning, improve pricing and promotions, and reduce food waste while maintaining quality and margins. 

Transcript 

I’m, David Hinojosa. I’m the Chief Operating Officerr for Vallarta Supermarkets. We are a, supermarket, we have over 60 locations in all of, California from Southern Cal all the way up to Northern California. 

We have full fledged perishable departments all the way from, produce to taquerias to caneserias, which are beef markets, all the way to, center store. Basically, we cover about 25,000 SKUs in our stores. You know, the improvements we’ve seen so far are pretty dynamic, and I’ll tell you why. Because we’re a forty-year-old company. 

So, although we do have 60-plus locations, we’re a fairly young retailer. But the improvements we’ve seen are – just the simple fact that we’re using data to enhance our store floor planning has been a huge win for us already. We really want to become that high-tech retailer, and RELEX is a big part of that platform that we’re trying to achieve. 

And when I say it’s a big part, it’s like a 40-50% of part of our entire ecosystem. And with RELEX’s help, we can really achieve the goals that we’re trying to achieve, of course, in the future. I will tell you the past, six months since we started to use RELEX, it has really changed the dynamics of what we’re trying to achieve. Price and promotions have gotten much, much better. 

And, also, we’ve continued to kind of hold our margin at the same time, which has been a big win for us as well. It’s really easy to lower price. It’s extremely easy to lower price. It’s hard to lower price at the same time and keep your margins up at the same time, and RELEX has been a big help doing that. 

I would say probably 95% of it is because of RELEX. It’s extremely important at Vallarta to reduce food waste because we are such heavily focused on fresh, and, some of our big departments create quite a bit of production, which is in food. And we wanna make sure that we not only provide the best and the quality and the freshest food, but we also reduce the waste at the same time. And so that to us is, a huge, area that we’re trying to, move forward in the future. 

The problem is the amount of stores you get, the harder and harder it gets to become that. So we need a partner to help us do that, and RELEX would definitely help us get to that point. I think for us, what’s the most important piece here is that we’re in the people business 100%. And not only the people that work for us internally, but people that are partnering on the outside. 

And one thing that RELEX has been very instrumental is showing how good their people are and how good they can be with us. And they’ve they’ve bent over backwards to help us on everything we’re trying to achieve. 

Everything that they understand, they’re trying to help us, but everything that we throw at them, they also try to understand just the same. And that in our self creates that partnership that we’re looking for in the future. We’re very cautious who we partner with because we’re trying to build systems not only for today, but for the future. And one of the big pieces for that is make sure that we are building them with the right people. 

So I think one thing that sold us on RELEX is how well the company is managed, but also how good the people are. And when we sat down with the team, quite a bit multiple times, I can’t even tell you how many times, it’s it was really evident that their culture, like I said before, and our culture match, and therefore, we have the same objectives. And those objectives, when they become in line, then we start to create some kind of magic. And that’s what’s starting to happen right now. 

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