UNFI Product Descriptions

[CommunityJedi22]

QUALITY PRODUCT DESCRIPTIONS

Quality item descriptions are critical to a successful new item setup. However, the descriptions sent by many suppliers today do not allow us to successfully identify new items. As a result, we have thousands of items set up incorrectly because of bad product descriptions sent by our suppliers in GDSN.

It’s very important for you to provide clear and unabbreviated description information when sending your “New” publications to us, to assist us in applying accurate brand and description text to your items in our systems.

Description Attributes We Capture, And How They’re Used

UNFI captures the following description and brand fields, and uses them in the new item set up process:

• tradeItemDescription
• shortDescription
• functionalName
• brandName
• subBrand    

• UNFI uses these fields to create quality brands & descriptions for the UNFI conventional systems.

Use The “tradeItemDescription” Attribute Correctly

We expect to receive high-quality product description attributes via the GDSN "tradeItemDescription" attribute, which can be up to about 180 characters long. 

• The GDSN Trade Item Implementation Guide states that this attribute should be:
  • This should be a meaningful description of the trade item with full spelling to facilitate message processing. Retailers can use this description as the base to fully understand the brand, flavor, scent etc. of the specific GTIN in order to accurately create a product description as needed for their internal systems.

• For mixed mods and displays, this description should be detailed to differentiate between your various offerings.

1.    Product Description GUIDELINES

Do not...

• Use Abbreviations
• Concatenate words

Do include…

• Flavor/color of item
• Brand of item
• What type of food/item is it?
• What is it packaged in?
• Net content
• Does this item have a count? (i.e., 2 beef sticks in a package) 
• Any unique characteristics about packaging or the item itself

Excellent Description: 

"12 PACK BLUE BUNNY BLUE RIBBON CLASSICS 3.0 ICE CREAM CUP STRAWBERRY CHOCOLATE SWIRL"

Bad Description:

"TD FD 8oz M&C box" (should read – “4 pack Todd Foods 8oz Macaroni & Cheese”)

2.       SAP Users

For organizations using SAP as their ERP system, a common response we receive is that the description character limitations of SAP prevent them from sending quality descriptions.

However, we’ve confirmed with some of our suppliers who use SAP that a workaround is possible, enabling them to send the quality descriptions we expect:

• Establish a custom table that holds the data sync fields with the long description

Your organization is responsible for determining how to implement this workaround in SAP, so that high-quality long descriptions can be published to us.