What is MULO, and what SPINS' MULO+ adds

MULO: the Multi-Outlet syndicated data aggregate

The board deck has one line for quarterly sales: "$16M in MULO+." An investor asks what MULO+ is, and most analysts reach straight for a definition. Wrong instinct. For a natural brand, the more useful answer is what MULO+ leaves out, because the omissions move the story as much as anything inside the number.

MULO stands for Multi-Outlet. It's a syndicated retail channel definition that started with IRI (now Circana) and got adopted across the industry as the standard "broad measured retail" cut. What's in it:

• Food / Grocery: supermarkets and grocery chains like Kroger, Albertsons, Publix, H-E-B, and the rest.
• Drug: the drug chains, meaning CVS, Walgreens, Rite Aid.
• Mass merchandisers and Walmart: Walmart gets its own slice, because its category weight is large enough to distort anything it's bundled into.
• Club: the warehouse clubs, Sam's Club and BJ's. Costco does not report to syndicators, so it's effectively missing from MULO even though club itself counts as a channel.
• Dollar: the dollar chains, Dollar General and Family Dollar.
• Military DECA: military commissaries.

All told, MULO covers roughly 104,000 retail locations. It's the wide standard cut, and "wide" here still excludes natural channel, specialty, convenience, and e-commerce.

So when a brand says "we did $X in MULO last quarter," that's sales across all those formats added together.

What MULO is missing

MULO was built to cover the conventional retail mainstream, and it does that well. For a natural, specialty, or wellness brand, though, three gaps actually matter.

Whole Foods coverage in syndicated data is a mess. Whole Foods doesn't report to SPINS at all. NielsenIQ carries it directly — Whole Foods is NielsenIQ's analytics client. Circana folds only a projected Whole Foods into the conventional grocery universe, estimated from panel data and other outside sources. The upshot: "Whole Foods sales" is a different number depending on which syndicator you happen to ask.

The natural and specialty channel, meaning Sprouts, Natural Grocers, the independent natural co-ops, and specialty retailers, is simply not in MULO at all.

E-commerce, convenience, and regional independents outside the covered chains are missing too.

For a wellness brand whose business runs through natural retailers, a plain MULO read can produce a small, slow-growing number that looks nothing like the real business. That's the whole reason pure MULO is the wrong lens for a natural-channel brand. The data isn't wrong. It's just not pointed at where the brand sells.

What MULO+ adds to standard SPINS MULO coverage

MULO+ is SPINS' extension of standard MULO, and the composition is spelled out plainly:

MULO+ = SNE (Specialty/Natural Enhanced) + MULO (powered by IRI / Circana)

The natural side, SNE, is SPINS' own Natural Enhanced channel: roughly 1,800 full-format stores, each doing $2M+ in annual sales with at least 40% of UPC-coded sales coming from natural, organic, or specialty products. The conventional side, MULO, arrives through SPINS' partnership with Circana, which licenses the underlying conventional data.

What MULO+ doesn't add is Whole Foods. Whole Foods doesn't report to SPINS, and it doesn't feed the IRI/Circana scanner stream the way other grocers do, so MULO+ gives you no clean Whole Foods read. Brands that need Whole Foods accuracy go to NielsenIQ — Whole Foods' own analytics provider — for the direct read; Circana only offers a channel-total estimate.

When to use MULO vs. MULO+ vs. Natural

The decision rule is pretty mechanical once you know where a brand's business actually lives.

If the brand sells entirely in conventional grocery, drug, mass, club, and dollar, with no natural exposure at all, use pure MULO. Reading it via Circana gets you the cleanest number to set against major-brand peers.

If the brand straddles conventional and natural, and most emerging health-and-wellness brands do, MULO+ is the right default summary metric, with the standing caveat that Whole Foods isn't cleanly inside it.

If the brand is concentrated in natural and specialty, which is typical for an early-stage wellness brand, the Natural channel cut is the primary read and the others are secondary.

The usual trajectory: a brand starts Natural-only, graduates to MULO+ as conventional retailers pick it up, and eventually reports MULO alongside MULO+ once conventional becomes the bigger share of the business.

A worked example: reading the MULO number in a board deck

Take a functional beverage brand doing roughly $18M in annual revenue. Its SPINS data, for the trailing 52 weeks, breaks out like this:

The board deck wants one number, and there are three candidates.

"$16M in MULO+" covers 89% of the business and is the industry's standard broad-channel summary. It's correct, and it undercounts Whole Foods.

"$9.2M in Natural Channel" is accurate for the natural surface but ignores 49% of the business. It will mislead any board member who already knows the brand is in Kroger and Target.

"$18M total" needs a footnote: that the Whole Foods piece comes from Circana rather than SPINS, and that the $2M is the brand's own estimate built off Whole Foods sell-through data.

The right call is MULO+ as the headline number, with a footnote that Whole Foods adds an estimated ~$2M outside the MULO+ panel. That's honest about where the data seams are. It dodges both traps at once: overclaiming by pretending Whole Foods sits inside MULO+ when it doesn't, and underclaiming by leaving Whole Foods out of the picture entirely.

Where MULO/MULO+ get misused

The first misuse is comparing numbers across syndicators as if they were the same thing. Circana's MULO, NielsenIQ's xAOC (their version of the broad-channel cut), and SPINS' MULO+ are three different universes. A brand reporting "MULO sales up 8%" off Circana data is not directly comparable to a peer reporting MULO+ sales off SPINS. The denominator differs and so does the retailer list. Whole Foods alone accounts for a meaningful slice of the gap; it's in Circana's MULO and absent from SPINS' MULO+.

So if a competitor uses Circana MULO and your brand uses SPINS MULO+, any share-of-market comparison comes out skewed. The Circana universe is bigger because it includes Whole Foods; the SPINS universe is deeper on natural attributes. Neither one is wrong. They're just different measurement surfaces, and they don't add up to each other.

The second misuse is treating MULO+ as "all retail." It isn't. MULO+ leaves out e-commerce (mostly), pure convenience retail, regional grocery chains that don't license POS, Costco, and the long tail of independent specialty retailers below SPINS' coverage threshold. For a brand with real DTC, Amazon, or Costco revenue, the MULO+ number can undercount the total business badly.

A natural pet-food brand with strong Chewy.com and Amazon sales can easily run 20–30% of total revenue outside MULO+. When a board member asks "how big is the category," the MULO+ number is answering a narrower question than "how big is the category including digital." Naming what's inside and outside the measurement surface is the bare minimum for any category-level analysis.

The MULO evolution: IRI, Circana, and what changed

MULO started as an IRI channel definition. When IRI and NPD Group merged in August 2022 to become Circana, the underlying MULO data and methodology didn't change overnight. Circana kept backward compatibility for existing customers. SPINS' MULO+ still rides on the Circana conventional-data layer through the same partnership it always did.

What did move was Circana's product naming and its portal. If you're reconciling historical SPINS MULO+ data against Circana reports, the definition of "MULO" should hold steady across the transition. But if you're running multi-year comparisons that straddle the August 2022 merger date, check with your SPINS rep first. Some category definitions and retailer inclusions got updated alongside the rebranding, and those quiet changes are exactly the kind that bite a trend chart.

The Costco gap inside MULO and MULO+

Costco is the highest-profile retailer that sits fully outside the syndicated measurement surface. The "club" channel that MULO covers in principle includes Costco, but Costco doesn't license its scanner data to any of the three major syndicators. So in practice MULO numbers exclude Costco completely, even when the brand has real Costco distribution.

For wellness and natural brands, Costco can be 10–25% of total revenue once a brand graduates into club. A board deck reporting "$16M in MULO+" for a brand doing $3M at Costco is understating the business by a wide margin. And unlike the Whole Foods gap, where NielsenIQ at least gives you a real Whole Foods read, there is no syndicated proxy for Costco at all. The only source of weekly Costco sales for a brand is Costco's own sell-through reports to suppliers, through Costco's buyer-facing systems.

The same gap shows up, smaller, in a few other places:

• Trader Joe's has never licensed scanner data. It belongs inside MULO conceptually and is invisible in any syndicated measurement.
• ALDI ran a similar policy historically. Coverage stays thin enough that ALDI revenue is best treated as outside MULO when you're planning.
• Most regional independents and the long tail of mom-and-pop retail are too small per store to license individually, so they're absent from MULO even where they add up to real category share in a specific market.

When you're sizing total brand revenue against MULO+, the working rule of thumb is to assume 5–20% of true revenue sits outside the measurement surface. More for brands strong in Costco, Trader Joe's, regional chains, or DTC; less for brands packed into the conventional mainstream. A brand doing $40M total might report $33M in MULO+ with the $7M gap mostly in Costco and Amazon. That's a diagnostic, not a problem, as long as the board deck says so out loud.

Doing this in Scout

Scout reports against whatever channel cuts are sitting in your SPINS extracts, the same Natural, MULO, and MULO+ slices SPINS publishes, in one analytical surface. The choice of denominator is visible in the dashboard rather than buried in a report's defaults. For a brand that genuinely spans channels, that's what kills the "which number do I show the board" scramble, the one that happens when three valid answers live in three different files. The board question, "what's our MULO+ total," becomes a read, not a derivation.

Summary + further reading

• MULO is the conventional grocery + drug + mass + club + dollar aggregate, an industry-standard cut that started with IRI/Circana.
• MULO+ is SPINS' extension: it adds the SNE (Specialty/Natural Enhanced) channel onto MULO, with the conventional side powered by Circana data.
• Whole Foods sits outside SPINS coverage completely. For a Whole Foods read, brands go to NielsenIQ, which carries it directly; Circana only offers a channel-total projection.
• Don't treat cross-syndicator MULO comparisons (Circana MULO vs. SPINS MULO+) as apples-to-apples. Denominator and retailer-list differences matter, and Whole Foods especially.

Related: What is SPINS data? · Syndicated vs. panel data