Tips From Executives on 3 Sides of the Convenience Supply Chain

LAS VEGAS — If a company is operating the same way it did prior to 2020, there’s probably a better way to do it, Holly Veale said.

Veale, vice president of purchasing at Core-Mark International, spoke at the 2022 NACS Show alongside Brad Haga, vice president of grocery and general merchandise at Casey’s General Stores, and Bill Williamson, senior vice president of commercial operations at Monster Energy.

• Casey’s is No. 3 on CSP’s 2022 Top 202 ranking of U.S. convenience-store chains by store count.

The three executives interact with the supply chain in different ways, but they all have been affected by problems spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic. Key takeaways they shared: Be flexible with assortment, have open and honest communication between distributors and retailers and create innovative solutions.

Click through to see more tips from the panel…

Some learnings from 2020 and 2021 changed the course for 2022. One of those learnings for Haga: Everything we do starts with the stores.

As the world changes, leadership at Casey's must put on the store leader’s hat to understand what they are asking their employees to do, he said, and if it’s a fair ask. Put everything through the filter of the employees and the customers, Haga said.

He also was a fan of the SKU rationalization that many suppliers implemented. It was a learning that Casey’s, Ankeny, Iowa, could take into its private-label and food brands, he said.  

“Let’s make sure that we can take care of the core form a supply chain perspective, but then also lean in to innovation that we’re darn well sure of versus trying everything,” Haga said.

Over the past two and a half years, the safety stock in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) world has been depleted, and there’s been an increase in demand, Veale said.

“The world just kind of keeps throwing things at us,” she said. “And assuming we don’t have another catoptric issue, I think we’re going to continue to see that increase [in production of goods]. But the scary thing is that we don’t have our safety net back yet.”

Veale said retailers and distributors “shot ourselves in the foot” with just-in-time inventory strategies before the pandemic, which has a company receive goods as close as possible to when they are actually needed.

“It’s hard, the retailers don’t have large backstock,” she said. “As a wholesaler, we don’t think of ourselves as a warehouse. We’re a distribution center, we want to turn inventory. But we’ve got to look at that a little bit differently and recognize that our investments in inventory, while they do increase risk and increase carrying costs, they are going to insulate it because ultimately it doesn’t matter what our carrying cost is if we don’t have products to sell.”

Monster Energy did two things when the pandemic hit to help manage supply constraints: It paused production on SKUs outside of the core items, and it decided to play the long game, Williamson said.

“Our leadership [decided] we’re going to play the long game versus the short game. So we focused on retailer in-stock as the priority and service over products,” he said.

The energy drink company also avoided laying employees off.

“Monster said, ‘You know what, it goes against our family values. It’s not who we are. We understand the cost of turnover—this thing’s going to be over, we’re going to have to hire them back, train them back.’ And let me tell you, the loyalty that we have with the Monster employees is like second to none,” Williamson said.