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Until 2024, family-owned Kansas City grocer Cosentino’s Food Stores had explored several solutions and vendors to address its loss prevention needs, but those efforts became increasingly unsustainable amid rising retail crime and violence.
Their previous case management system offered broken promises of crime linking and poor customer service causing Cosentino’s to reach a breaking point. Top of the list of challenges to address was decreasing the amount of time spent on event reporting and improving collaboration with law enforcement.
Now, in 2026, they have a “seamless” partnership with Auror that has helped them:
Cosentino’s faced three main challenges prior to Auror:
The time it took to report events: With their previous reporting system, it took the loss prevention (LP) team more than two hours to build each report. Documentation of events relied on manual imputation into a spreadsheet.
The lack of actionable intelligence: Their previous case management system gave them a platform to report data on, but the team was limited to “known loss” and basic statistics. They couldn’t do anything meaningful with the data without having to spend hours manually building cases.
Getting reports and evidence to police in a timely and efficient way: Prior to Auror, sharing evidence with police involved physical deliveries of CDs or sharing evidence over insecure links. It was extremely difficult to build the quality of cases needed to successfully engage law enforcement.
On top of these challenges, they struggled with inadequate support from their previous provider and being able to prove any ROI for the LP department.
We had some really raw data that we couldn’t really flesh out…We were spending more labor fine-tuning that, trying to get it all lined up together.
Chris Vandiver, Director of Loss Prevention
Cosentino’s rolled out Auror in October 2024 off the back of a strong business case in support of switching to the Retail Crime Intelligence platform, with the top selling point for the company decision-makers being the labor savings.
The initial roll-out focused on the Intel, Investigate, Connect the Dots, and Insights features. Within six months they were in advanced pilot stages, integrating with Zellman, aligning their reporting standard operating procedures, and training internal and external guard teams.
Chris Vandiver, Director of Loss Prevention, says he quickly saw how Auror could help him and his team build a strong body of evidence against prolific offenders.
“With the connected dots and with everything else [Auror] already has, it's much easier to put these cases together and build them.”
Given their previous experience, there was some hesitation from the team as they worked through the initial learning process. But this all changed once they began reporting, building quality cases, and identifying trends across their network of stores, all on a centralized platform.
Particularly for a grocery retailer, the receipt building function has helped tremendously by making it easy to identify and report stolen items without having to physically shop the store after a shoplifting event.
Chris says using Auror compared to their previous provider is like night and day.
"Everything we're able to do within Auror we couldn't do [with the previous provider]. We couldn't do the receipt building. We couldn't do the collaboration. We couldn't do the report directly to police type situations…The amount of savings we had just in labor alone covered the cost [of Auror].”
Auror’s impact was swift and has helped Cosentino’s LP team evolve from reacting to incidents, to taking a proactive and modern approach to loss prevention.
Chris emphasized an impressive 346% ROI that has transformed the LP team into a value-adding part of the business.
“We actually have ROI in the department, we’re not a cost expenditure,” he says. “Last year our ROI was, I’m very proud to say, 346%.”
This was achieved through the time and labor efficiencies provided by Auror in connecting the dots, reporting to police, building reports, and sharing evidence.
The team saves two to three hours of reporting per event and now has a median reporting time of just eight minutes. This is a huge 90%+ reduction in time spent reporting an event compared with before, freeing up the team to focus on their most prolific POIs.
Additionally, the quality of their event reporting has skyrocketed, with 97% of events reported with images and 99% of events reported with descriptors. These crucial details help improve POI identification and reporting accuracy, maintaining high quality reports.
This, along with 100% of stores now reporting, has helped keep 15 out of 20 top POIs out of their stores in 2025.
Being able to connect incidents more effectively, uncover repeat POIs, aggregate evidence, and share intel via Auror with law enforcement agencies has helped the team make strides in engaging law enforcement.
“It has significantly improved our ability to deliver reports to law enforcement in a timely manner,” Chris says.
“We have had multiple instances where we were able to quickly and efficiently compile video, images, and itemized evidence and provide it to PD for suspects already in custody.”
“Everyone at Auror has just been amazing. It’s a great partnership.”
Chris Vandiver, Director of Loss Prevention
Aside from the productivity efficiencies, Chris highlights the “great partnership” formed between his team and Auror’s customer team. Rather than an impersonal vendor relationship, the partnership is characterized by quality bespoke support from Auror, open communication, and a seamless onboarding process.
It can be difficult getting bigger vendors to take notice of smaller, regional companies, let alone provide them with high-quality support. But Chris notes how from the start, Auror was open to helping Cosentino’s find a solution that would work best for them.
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