Providing professional consulting assistance to retailers, distributors, and consumer products clients.

We can assist your organization to meet the unique food industry challenges of:

Operational benchmarking
Best practice identification and implementation
Front-end organization
Produce, bakery, deli, seafood, meat, dairy, floral, grocery, and receiving performance improvement
Pharmacy procedures and performance improvement
Labor standards and scheduling system implementation and utilization
Customer interface strategies
Customer patterns matched to staffing
Cash office management
Front-end management and rapid check-out
Production planning techniques
Grocery / night crew labor management
Efficient backroom sortation practices
Backroom programs and re-order procedures
Category management
Reorder & inventory management
Layout and design
Vendor labor utilization
Shrink awareness, shrink control and shrink reduction, waste control
Associate salesmanship
Organizational structure alignment and span of control assessment
Allocation accuracy
Store systems assessment
Vendor labor management
Support tools effectiveness and utilization
Vendor negotiation and DSD receiving processes
Pricing accuracy
Multi-channel coordination
Procedures documentation
Optimized merchandise acquisition and life cycle management
Inventory management and cycle count procedures
Operational training
Management reporting mechanisms
Managerial skills training
Inventory optimization and SKU rationalization
CRM and loyalty programs

Grocery and Food Operations

Our grocery consulting team is staffed by food industry and supermarket experts who have decades of deep operational experience and industry leadership experience. We believe that the food segment of retail is sufficiently unique to warrant specialists who know food operations intimately.

Having a current industry specific benchmark database is evidence of our detailed knowledge of this retail segment. Our food operations experience base permits us to rapidly identify opportunity areas for our clients and recommend specific improvements that are both implementable with the skills we will teach your team and valuable in that they will reduce your operating expense. If your organization is experiencing operational challenges, we can help.

Our goal is to develop and refine your operational technique into true best practices. We achieve this through:

Leadership and change enablement workshops and training sessions
Action Teams
Brainstorming sessions
Team member involvement throughout the process
Extensive management and team member involvement
Cultural sensitivity
A strong results orientation

Our approach includes:

Project Coordinator development
Regular management updates
Value added analysis
A Model Store / Learning Center and limited transfer testing
Implemented solutions for testing in a controlled environment
Performance measurement
Development of a Transfer Methodology
Scope definition recommendations for Phase II
Train-The Trainer sessions

Our approach to working with a client organization is focused on partnering. We see our role as one of a coach, teaching our client teams to function more effectively. We measure our success by their ability to function well once we leave, having benefited greatly from our presence. Our expert team can assist your firm.

Sample Deliverables:

Typical food (store operations) projects begin with a detailed assessment for senior management. In this assessment we identify and explain all of the opportunities we believe exist for a client. Our approach is to give our clients all of the detail they would need to make positive change happen in their stores. Most of our clients have been so impressed with our depth of understanding that they have asked us to implement the agreed upon changes for them. An average client experiences a 3 - 5% sales increase and store payroll improvement of 50 - 100 basis points

For a regional chain with a significant “fresh” format we identified more than 35 key operational improvements that were key to their future profitability. We implemented our recommendations in 3 model store locations before the chain rolled the new processes and procedures out to the entire company. The ROI was 20X within one year
For a major supermarket chain with 1000+ stores we performed an extended, detailed review of their field operations (stores and distribution centers) and identified $265M (annually) worth of procedural improvements

Store Operations Benchmarking Customer Service Food Operations Merchandising Inventory Management Distribution IT Systems Supply Chain Training Programs Organizational Restructure Expert Witness Services Due Diligence Services