account call
Had a great meeting with Albert Gottuso and Michael Cribbs. Albert is the new Produce Category Manager. He replaced Darrell Piliego. Michael Cribbs replace Carlos Martinez as the produce buyer over Cherries and stone fruit. Both have been with Publix for a long time, with Albert working for Publix since 1978. Both are new in these positions and they had a lot of questions and concerns. After spending over an hour with them, I feel like all their questions were answered and satisfied. They said they were really going to try to keep the momentum going from the previous years and plan on running as many ads as possible. I feel they are convinced that Northwest Cherries are the best and they want to promote them. They were also disappointed that they did not capitalize on the Stone Fruit promotions offered to them last year. I feel that we will see them do more in this area than last year. Along with the regular promotion offered to them, they are going to do a "peak of the Season" promotion as well. I offered them a demo program and the possibility to run a display or volume increase contest, but they elected to go with the Peak of the season push sometimes in July. All in all I think our meeting was very productive and informative to them.
Both gentlemen had a lot of questions/concerns about our programs as both of them are new in their jobs. Several questions that they asked and surprised me were as follows: Where exactly do the Cherries have to come from to be classified as Northwest? Are Canadian cherries considered for their ads? Why do they have to send in proof of their ads---The Grape commission according to them does not required it as anyone can go on line and see their ads and print them off for themselves. Stemilt had been in to see them earlier, and I do not know if they were just testing me to see if our stories matched, etc. However, I feel I was able to answer and justify every thing they asked me about. A lot of the information could be found in the kits I gave them and we went through very closely. Like I said I was with them for over an hour. I left feeling very good about our meeting and knew the answers to all of their concerns. Feel like I even got them on the right course with the Stone fruit program for 2019. They were not really impressed or concerned about the bonus they could earn for each ad, and said space was restrictive. If they could get the bonuses fine, but was not enough dollars to worry about. On the give-aways, They accepted the box of goodies, but reminded me of the Publix of old and that some of the things like the storage chargers would have to be turned in to the general stash, as they could not accept anything that was over $5.00 and was very cautious with electronic devices for fear of a virus being present.