SAS Retail Services, the merchandising arm of the Daymon Worldwide Retail Services group, has recently been named the single source provider at three additional Kroger divisions: Ralphs, Fry’s and Dillons. Added to SAS’ earlier win of the single source contracts for Fred Meyer and QFC (Quality Food Centers) stores, along with its existing contract at Food 4 Less, SAS now provides complete retail merchandising services for over 32 percent of Kroger’s more than 750 stores nationwide.
“This win continues to show the SAS value and the strength of our relationship with Kroger,” says Jeff Hunter, SAS Retail Services’ Vice President for the Kroger program.
The opportunity to expand its in-store merchandising services across the Kroger brand came about when Kroger decided to change its retail services model late last year. Previously, different brokers were responsible for in-store merchandising based on net sales of the products they helped bring into the store. This meant there could be as many as five different companies handling the in-store merchandising of different products within a single Kroger store. Under the new single source model, that role now falls to one single company who offers the best program proposal—SAS, in the case of the six divisions named above.
“Moving from the old ‘fair share’ model to this single source model puts Kroger more in control of the costs and helps make the overall merchandising process more efficient,” explains Hunter.
SAS’ dedicated on-site field teams at Ralphs stores in California, Fry’s locations in Arizona and Dillons markets in the Midwest will now complete all merchandising work within the grocery, frozen, dairy, drug and general merchandising departments. They will also complete all remodels and new store setups for those banners. This includes providing full logistics, scheduling, warehousing, management, assembly, setup, tracking and reporting. In addition, SAS will continue to work with the Kroger corporate branding team to ensure all stores within these divisions—and across the Kroger brand—continue to meet corporate brand merchandise execution standards.
“The key to our success has been the three-way relationship between ourselves, Kroger and the Daymon Worldwide North American Brokerage team at Kroger,” says Hunter. “We work right alongside each other both at the corporate and retail levels, which enables us to execute projects very quickly. We look forward to continuing to build on this relationship and deliver high-quality executions in an effort to further expand our services to additional Kroger divisions as they adopt the new single service model.”
