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Customer video: C&S Wholesale Grocers

May 23, 2025 • 3 min

C&S Wholesale Grocers, Inc. (C&S) is an industry leader in supply chain solutions and wholesale grocery supply in the United States, with over 100 years in the grocery business. Andrew Connell, SVP of Procurement at C&S Wholesale Grocers, discusses how RELEX Solutions has transformed their supply chain operations, helping them achieve substantial improvements in service levels, order quality, inventory management, and sustainability. 

Transcript 

C&S Wholesale Grocers is a large grocery wholesale company based in Keene, New Hampshire. We service chain supermarkets and independent supermarkets. 

The company has been in business for more than 100 years, and we have a reputation of providing excellent service to our customers and being an innovator in the industry. And we looked at the hierarchy of our supply chain applications a few years ago, and we determined that, while we had generated really valuable capabilities within our systems, the architecture of the systems wasn’t particularly scalable. It was a combination of products that we had purchased and products that we had developed in-house. We chose RELEX for a couple of reasons. 

I’d say, first and foremost, the platform and the platform approach of the product, so that it’s not a black box that our business needs to fit within, but a platform that we could configure, based on the specific needs and goals of our business. We were very impressed by the capabilities, once configured, that the system would allow us to optimize for things like service levels, inventories, or spoilage. Now that we’ve been on the system for a year and a half, we’ve seen substantial benefits in our service levels, the quality of the orders that we’re writing, the inventory levels that we’re able to carry into our facilities. 

We’re interested and excited about starting to explore some new capabilities within the system to optimize the supply chain, the flow of goods, and the demand-signal-sharing that we can do with our vendors and our customers. And really planning out the future with our customers, versus kind of reacting on a day-to-day basis. As we’ve implemented RELEX from a sustainability standpoint, the biggest opportunity we’ve been focused on is taking trucks off the road, and our ability to write better orders, to more completely fill trucks out with our suppliers, that enables us to reduce the amount of trucks, coming inbound to C&S. 

We’ve made progress in that area. We believe that’s one of the big future unlocks for us as we continue to refine and configure the system. And what we’ve really reinforced with our team is the importance of using this opportunity to fundamentally improve our processes, to approach problems differently in the future than we have in the past. And utilizing the RELEX technology as the enabler of doing that, versus fitting into a box. Instead, building the platform of our business for the future, powered by RELEX, but taking our capabilities, our processes, our know-how, our competitive advantage to the next level, in concert with that system project. A lot more to come. You know, we’re very pleased with the platform, the efficiency that it’s driven for us, but we’re really excited about what the future holds as well.

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