Coke Florida Receives Award for Innovation in Supply Chain Planning

Coca-Cola Beverages Florida, LLC (Coke Florida), the sixth largest Coca-Cola bottler in the United States, receives the 2024 ICONic Customer Award for Supply Chain Planning Resiliency, presented by Blue Yonder.

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Terrence Gee, (right) senior vice president, Technology and Enterprise Transformation for Coca-Cola Beverages Florida, LLC, accepts the Blue Yonder 2024 ICONic Award for Supply Chain Resiliency. He is joined by (left-right) Baron Jordan, chief product officer - supply chain, CONA Services LLC and Susan Beal, chief customer officer, Blue Yonder. (Photo: Business Wire)

Coke Florida operates an exclusive sales and distribution network covering 47 of 67 Florida counties, spanning from Jacksonville to the Florida Keys. Evolving business processes, enhancing capabilities, and investing in technology innovation are integral to the mission of Coke Florida’s Enterprise Technology team.

“Distributing over 119 million cases of beverage products annually requires continuous innovation across our supply chain networks and technology infrastructure that enables Coke Florida the capability to better serve our partners, customers, and suppliers,” said Terrence Gee, senior vice president, Technology and Enterprise Transformation for Coke Florida.

Blue Yonder is a digital supply chain transformation provider. The ICONic Customer Awards program honors organizations leveraging the company’s solutions to enhance technology capabilities and embracing innovation to drive autonomous, sustainable, and predictive logistics solutions. Awardees are digital leaders, retailers, and companies like Coke Florida who have demonstrated resiliency through digital planning to solve complex problems and uncover opportunities.

Over the last three years, Coke Florida has leveraged Blue Yonder Demand Planning, Supply Planning, and Transportation Management solutions across its enterprise and has seamlessly integrated with partner networks. By implementing Blue Yonder technology, Coke Florida has created an interoperable platform that drives significant cost, service, and efficiency improvements across the supply chain.

“This award and recognition from Blue Yonder are confirmation that we’ve deployed the right solutions exceptionally well within our business and technology platforms. It also acknowledges that we’re experiencing positive results from the partnership,” said Gee.

Jeremie Hayford, vice president, Planning - Commercial Operations, leads the Coke Florida team responsible for commercial planning and digital supply chain transformation work. Hayford said that through the company’s innovative planning platform, which includes collaboration with Blue Yonder and CONA Services LLC, a Coca-Cola System IT services company, load automation has increased from zero to over 70 percent, optimizing resources and reducing the number of shipments.

“The system is designed to consider inventory, equipment, product, and packaging constraints for load-building within the scope of our planning parameters,” said Hayford. “Our planners now have an automated process of looking at all these components to maximize transportation and delivery efficiency.”

“We are excited to award Coca-Cola Beverages Florida and CONA Services the Blue Yonder ICONic Award for ‘Supply Chain Resiliency’,” said Shri Hariharan, head of manufacturing industry solutions, Blue Yonder. “Through their partnership with CONA Services and use of Blue Yonder solutions, Coca-Cola Beverages Florida has pushed boundaries and innovated to demonstrate resiliency to solve the most challenging problems and move their business forward. We couldn’t be more proud of what we have achieved together, allowing them to deliver on their promise to their customers. Congratulations!”

The national supply chain award was presented to Coke Florida at the 2024 ICON conference in Grapevine, Texas. This recognition follows Coke Florida’s third consecutive designation by Deloitte-Private and The Wall Street Journal as a US Best Managed Company. The Best Managed Company program highlights the success of U.S. private companies demonstrating excellence in strategy, execution, culture, and governance/financials.

About Coca-Cola Beverages Florida, LLC

Coca-Cola Beverages Florida, LLC (Coke Florida) is the sixth largest Coca-Cola bottler in the United States. Coke Florida markets, sells, manufactures, distributes, and merchandises products of The Coca-Cola Company in an exclusive territory that covers over 21 million consumers across 47 Florida counties that includes the Miami, Tampa, Orlando, and Jacksonville metropolitan areas. The company employs over 5,000 associates and has four GreenCircle certified manufacturing facilities and eighteen sales and distribution centers. Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Tampa, Coke Florida is the one of the largest Black-owned businesses in the United States and is Minority Business Enterprise (MBE) certified. In 2024, Coke Florida was recognized as a US Best Managed Company by Deloitte-Private and The Wall Street Journal for the third consecutive year. To learn more, visit cokeflorida.com.

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“Distributing over 119M cases of beverage products annually requires continuous innovation across our supply chain networks and technology infrastructure that enables Coke Florida the capability to better serve our partners, customers, and suppliers."