And here are some key takeaways from the conversation:
Linus Kalenze
“The consumer base across North America has never been more health conscious, more brand conscious than they are today. And this is creating unparalleled opportunity for innovation and new products... On the other hand, the barriers to entry and the challenges for scaling have never been higher than they are today.”
“Just a few of those challenges that you all face every day are rising costs of source materials of packaging, of logistics, and the list goes on there. There's also an increasingly demanding consumer who has more choices than ever.”
“In order to grow your business, you not only have to have a unique and an outstanding product, but you've got to be able to compete on price, on service. And most importantly, you have to have your product on the shelf when the consumer wants it. So in order to accomplish those growth goals, and to delight your customers, a healthy high functioning supply chain is an absolute must.”
Adam Happ
“Is your network scalable? What I mean by that is things happen quickly, things move fast. When you start with a retailer, you might be in one region or you might be in one area. And if that retailer comes to you and says, ‘Hey, we want to get you nationwide,’ are you set up to be able to do that?... So as you're setting up that supply chain, don't think to what your customer is today. Think 2,3,4,5 steps ahead.”
“When you start getting your products on the shelves and in the stores, that retailer is not going to be ordering full truckload quantities of that product, they're not going to be able to sell through it fast enough... Are you partnering and finding somebody that you could leverage that has preexisting volumes in different places to keep your costs down?”
“One of the biggest things that we talk about is compliance fees, fines and deductions... Those are costs that you didn't plan for, costs that you didn't have on the front end, that can be a very big inhibitor on your business... Let's say you're only shipping a half of a pallet to a retailer. If you don't deliver that on time, you can get almost $500 in fees and fines... Aligning with partners and subject-matter expertise that understands the intricacies of compliance fees and fines of these retailers is so important to have success.”
“There's a lot of seasonality to business and a lot of things that that can occur that drive volumes up and down... Finding partners that can be agile and really change and be mode-agnostic and be able to jump from one mode to another and do it on the drop of a dime can be extremely important to be able to keep costs where they need to be, but then also keep services where they need to be.”
Joe Pajak
“[Greenleaf Foods] was experiencing explosive growth. There was a lot of building the plane in the sky... We had the same mindsets as a lot of people starting up, ‘We're going to do this ourselves, we're going to figure out a way.’... We found that it really wasn't working. We had a lot of poor on-time delivery performance... damaged product was bumping across the country and going from depot-to-depot-to-depot... and that toughness on the supply chain was losing a lot of credibility with our customers.”
“We had to go change our model... [C.H.] Robinson was ultimately the right partner for us, not only to achieve our goals, not just from their infrastructure, but how they use data... Their deeper analytics into certain markets, their capabilities of helping us understand warehousing information from transportation information, inbound information, outbound information, fuel assumptions... a lot of their reporting,a a lot of their analytics to help us understand more of our business and develop a much deeper partnership.”
“We've gotten into this consolidation program that really is for the final mile. So from that standpoint, we're in these backyards, we’re two to three days away... It allowed us then to concentrate our resources, and really tightly managed that inbound, how are we going to move efficiently from our manufacturing sites into the into the distribution centers themselves?”
“I'm leveraging all these resources in these teams. We're so deeply integrated together, we can talk freely about our business and help achieve the goals. Technology is there to support data transfers between our organizations, which really also helped us ease a lot of that burden of all those manual touches.”
Brandon Hernandez
“What I love about what you're talking about, this is a win-win on all sides of the supply chain for everybody. It's a win for you as a supplier, because now you're keeping costs down, and you're acting as more of a big, full truckload supplier. Now, let's go to your end customer, let's talk about the retailer that you're shipping that product to, think about the efficiency and the add in the value that you're bringing there, too.”
