In-Stock vs. Availability: The Recovered Sales Opportunity

In stock doesn’t mean on the shelf. And for CPG brands, that gap is costing more than most teams realize.

Storesight’s Henry Ho (Chief Strategy Officer) and Marc Yount (Chief Operating Officer) sit down with Mike Graen — a 37-year retail veteran with experience at P&G, Walmart, and Acosta — to unpack one of the most persistently misunderstood metrics in retail: on-shelf availability.

Not inventory position. Not system on-hand. What a customer — or a picker — can actually find and grab from the shelf.

Mike has spent decades at the intersection of OSA measurement, RFID, and store operations. His take is direct: most CPG companies are measuring the wrong thing, acting on the wrong signals, and leaving real money on the table every day as a result.

The opportunity isn’t incremental. It’s recovered. When product goes missing and comes back to the shelf, sales rebound — and that cumulative recovered sales figure adds up fast. Mike has seen brands move OSA from 92% to 97% and call it the most impactful initiative in their company’s history.

Bigger than any launch.

In this conversation, you’ll learn:

• Why “in stock” and “on-shelf availability” are not the same — and why that gap has a seven to ten point real-world spread
• What recovered sales are, why they’re distinct from incremental sales, and how to measure them
• The three root causes of out-of-stocks — and why “we all own it” means nobody does
• How online pickup and delivery turned the store shelf into a fulfillment center — and why nilpicks are now an OSA signal CPG teams can’t ignore
• Why agentic AI makes availability a conversion driver, not just an operational metric
• How RFID, computer vision, and shopper networks each contribute a different signal — and why no single tool solves this alone
• What a practical first step looks like for a CPG brand ready to stop guessing and start measuring

Rather than treating OSA as a supply chain problem to hand off, this episode reframes it as a commercial opportunity — one that field, sales, category, and operations teams can all point to, and one that pays off in the P&L when someone decides to own it.

About Storesight
Formed by the merger of Field Agent and Shelfgram, Storesight delivers always-on retail intelligence for CPG brands.

By combining a massive shopper network with advanced AI and image recognition, Storesight provides a continuous, objective view of in-store conditions — helping brands track on-shelf availability, monitor competitive moves, validate execution, and turn shelf reality into action.

Today, Storesight captures shelf conditions across 480 categories, 5,000 brands, and 50,000 locations, and is trusted by 95% of the top 50 CPG companies in North America.

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