Case Study: Sainsbury’s achieves a single source of truth, faster insights, and easier GDPR compliance with Snowflake

Snowflake Yields Better Insights and Eases GDPR Compliance for Sainsbury's

Sainsbury’s, the UK’s second-largest retailer with over 1,400 stores and multiple brands (Argos, Tu, Sainsbury’s Bank, Habitat), needed to unify fragmented, siloed data across channels so it could better know customers, remove duplication, and meet GDPR obligations. With data scattered across many systems, analysis and compliance requests were slow, labor-intensive, and hard to trace to authoritative sources.

Sainsbury’s consolidated its data into the Snowflake Data Cloud as a single source of truth, using Data Vault modeling, Snowflake Streams and Tasks for streaming, and Time Travel for iterative processing. The move simplified infrastructure and governance, enabled a new data‑science-driven product‑matching feature, improved GDPR responsiveness, and reduced systems by 8:1—empowering about 1,000 analysts to run queries and reports more effectively.

Sainsbury’s

Graeme Forbes

Principal Engineer