Supermarket Sweep with Jewel-Osco

Ate lunch on the bus as we left downtown Chicago and headed toward the suburb of Itasca. That’s where Jewel-Osco’s (leading Chicago supermarket) headquarters are located.

Willis Tower was not across the street and there was no in-office pub. But, we definitely learned just as much (and there is A LOT less traffic in Itasca).

Damon Grimes (’03) and Bonny Smith (’09) gave us the scoop on a career called “category management”. Many of us aspire to be brand managers, which involves managing the performance and strategy for a specific product or brand.

With category management at Jewel-Osco, you are in charge of an entire section of their supermarket. For instance, Damon is the category manager of Frozen Foods at Jewel-Osco.

He is in charge of that section for all 183 of Jewel-Osco’s Chicagoland stores. Frozen Foods amount to roughly $400 million per year in revenue for the company.

And the buck stops with Damon.

He says which frozen foods Jewel-Osco stocks and which ones they don’t.

How do you tell a CPG that just spent a year developing and testing a new frozen food that you can’t stock their product because you don’t think it will sell?

There is also growth in the “private label” section of frozen foods; Jewel-Osco sells its own frozen pizza.

What would happen if Damon didn’t think Jewel-Osco’s frozen pizza didn’t warrant shelf space? Imagine that conversation with your boss!

And, since the Jewel-Osco pizza does sell, how do you tell the big, name brand frozen pizza players that they potentially could lose shelf space even though they are selling?

We got more great insight into the challenges that await us at our internships and jobs. We enjoyed our time in Illinois immensely. Next stop: Whirlpool in Benton Harbor, Michigan.

Mike Hardman