Cost Effective Procurement of Local Strawberries from NC
Team: Michael Hargrave, Swaminathan Kandaswamy, Kamal Sunkara/Spring 2015
NC Growing Together partner US Foods is a national food distribution company offering more than 350,000 products to independent and multi-use restaurants, healthcare and hospitality entities. US Foods has two regional distribution centers in North Carolina located in Charlotte and Zebulon. US Foods physical structure and business processes align with large volume suppliers and are global in scope. The MBA team was given the responsibility of performing a profitability analysis for the procurement of local strawberries into the US Foods system. Their presentation outlines some of their findings from this analysis, which involved analyzing the costing structure for strawberries and comparing the cost difference between North Carolina Grown strawberries and non-North Carolina grown strawberries. The team visited and conducted interviews to understand the reasons behind the cost differences, possible solutions, and the estimated demand from US Foods customers.