It’s quite a rare feat when a company can manage to thrive alongside the largest of its peers—rivaling them in operational prowess, technological enhancement and good old-fashioned volume growth—and still leverage a cozy Main Street, USA sensibility as one of its greatest strengths. That’s probably why we only bestow our highest bottler honor once a year.

“There’s not anything that a large, publicly traded bottler can do that we, as a mid-size, independent bottler can’t do,” proclaims Bill Brown, chairman of Brown Bottling Group, Ridgeland, Miss., USA-based franchisee of Pepsi and Dr Pepper products and the 2008 Beverage World Bottler of the Year.

Photography By Greg Campbell

It seems like a bold statement, but a company doesn’t achieve consistent, double-digit year-on-year growth by being timid.

“We are part of the local community and we make our decisions based on our local customers,” Carter contends.

The story of Brown Bottling Group, which has become something of a Southern soft drink icon, actually begins in the Midwest. Its roots date back to the late ’40s when World War II veteran Kenneth A. Brown started his career selling for Coke of Chicago, leaving after a few years to become a pioneering advertising manger for the Pepsi-Cola Company’s Central division. His passion for the soft drink business met with his entrepreneurial spirit in 1966 when he and two partners purchased the struggling Pepsi-Cola Bottling Co. of Madison, Wis., USA. It didn’t take long for Brown to turn the business around before he and his partners set their sights on Mississippi. In 1971 they purchased the franchise rights for Dr Pepper, 7UP and Pepsi products for 29 counties there including the areas of Jackson, Meridian and Hattiesburg, creating what was then known as Pepsi-Cola of Southern Mississippi. That year, Brown moved with his family—including son, Bill, now chairman—from Wisconsin to Mississippi, where the Browns have remained ever since. Kenneth Brown sold his shares in the Wisconsin business in 1980 and bought 100 percent of the Mississippi operation. It was that same year that Bill Brown graduated from college and went to work full time for the family business. He became president in 1988 and changed the name of the company to its current moniker, Brown Bottling Group.

“Behind every strong bottler is a tradition of strong leadership and community spirit,” says Hugh Johnston, president of Pepsi-Cola North America Beverages. “At Brown Bottling that started with Ken Brown back in 1971 and it continues to be a hallmark for the company with his son Bill at the helm today.”

In 1989, the company furthered its growth trajectory when it purchased the franchise rights for McComb and Natchez, Miss., USA. Today, the company serves 45 counties in central and southern Mississippi, two in Alabama and three parishes in Louisiana, with a team of about 420 and annual volume of about 14 million cases. The company operates out of facilities in Jackson, Meridian, Hattiesburg, McComb and Natchez, building on the legacy of Kenneth Brown, who passed away about four years ago.

“Ken’s mantra was ‘Do it up Brown’ and the company still lives by those words everyday,” Johnston notes. “They believe in getting the fundamentals right—doing things right the first time and sharing your success with your customers and the community. I can think of no better game plan for success and no better way to explain how much Pepsi values our partnership with Brown.”

The Brown game plan has enabled it to grow its business to the tune of double-digit increases annually during the past six years, having dramatically expanded its cold drink business—tripled, in fact—among other areas.

“We take literally all the cash and reinvest in the business through new vehicles, buildings, cold drink expansion and IT,” Brown says.

Dr Pepper Snapple Group president and CEO Larry Young hails Brown’s strong management, “dedicated and passionate employees and superior focus on execution.” Young adds, “By understanding and responding to the needs of their customers and consumers, they continue to grow in a challenging competitive and economic environment...We are proud to be partners with Brown Bottling in marketing great brands like Dr Pepper, Sunkist, Hawaiian Punch and Canada Dry, and we congratulate them on their well-deserved recognition as bottler of the year.”

Operationally, Brown Bottling credits the implementation of its performance excellence model dubbed AIM: Analyze, Improve and Monitor. It’s a philosophy that’s applied not only to its sales team, but across the operation from delivery systems to technical support and human resources systems.

“The way we do the work is based on being able to analyze, improve and monitor that performance throughout the system,” explains Carter. “That sounds text-bookish, but it’s not. It’s real and it’s used each and every day here in each and everything we do.”

Carter notes that the process is not unlike training for the Olympics. No matter how good an athlete gets, true success lies not only in the immediate victory, but in continuing to raise the bar for future performance.

For a company that constantly plays to win, it’s no surprise that the sports analogies don’t end there. “We’ve recognized through that process that the days of the grand slam, the long touchdown run, the bomb or the touchdown pass are over,” Carter says. “We’re looking for small incremental gains throughout the system, not only to sustain the current success, but to continue to grow the business.”

With so many disciplines to encompass, it goes without saying that the AIM system has a lot of moving pieces to manage. Boiled down to its most basic components, it involves five key operational areas: leadership, strategic planning, a strong customer focus, information analysis and the right people.  

“We start with our leadership and look at our vision—where we want to be—our mission, how we’re going to get there and what kind of values that are going to keep us on the highway to success and out of the ditches,” Carter details. “Once you’ve set that leadership, you have to incorporate strategic planning that’s complete with tactical actions.”

Once the strategic plan’s in place the imperative becomes that strong focus on the retail customer. But the business plan doesn’t work without all of the necessary—not to mention correct—information and a sound means to analyze that information. Such intelligence not only tells the company how well it’s doing, but how it can do things better.

Then, of course, there’s the human factor.

“Without the right people in the right jobs, you’re not going to be successful—you’re certainly not going to be as successful as you could be,” Carter says. “It’s not just about hiring people to do a job, but hiring the right people, giving them the right resources and ensuring that they’ve got the same vision that everyone else does.”

Supply chain technology plays an increasingly prominent role in the beverage business and Brown Bottling attributes a great deal of its success to staying ahead of the curve with regard to such systems. The company got serious about technology back in the ’80s.

“Our decision at the time was that we wanted an integrated beverage system where once we put in a case sale, it followed the course of tracking it through the whole gambit from receivables through warehousing and so forth,” Brown recalls.

The “guts of the operation,” as Brown calls it, is the combination of HighJump’s DSD system and the Salient UXT business intelligence software. Brown Bottling has used some form of the HighJump system for the better part of two decades, evolving its operation as the technology itself evolved. HighJump’s route accounting system is central to Brown’s order-to-cash process. HighJump solutions also perform such key functions as inventory management, load building, vending, mobile presales and delivery. Meanwhile, the Salient system has complemented the HighJump solutions by enabling the bottler to perform sales analyses to keep track of the steadily increasing number of new SKUs, out-of-stocks, pricing histories, etc.

The company also has consulted with supply chain solutions provider St. Onge to help with is facility design and configurations and operational refinements.

“[The tech solutions] have helped us over the years to become more integrated and more forward-thinking,” observes Carter. “We’re no longer working on anecdotal information, we’re working on fact-based information, and technology enables us to have the facts.”

If, in the past, some independent bottlers had been run, as Brown says, “by the seat of their pants,” it’s virtually impossible to do so today. “With the way the economy is, the cost of fuel, the proliferation of brands, and all the different choices that consumers have, you just can’t do that anymore,” Brown warns. “You have to have a well-trained and well-oiled salesman out there that knows what to sell, when to sell and has all the tools that they could possibly have at the customer’s location.”

But even beyond technology, a solid management foundation and an operational framework for continuous improvement, the battery that keeps it all running and drives a company’s repeated success is passion for all the rigors and nuances of the bottling business.

“I’ve always told people, you can have a college degree, but I don’t know of any college you can go to and get a bottler’s degree,” Brown offers. “You have to learn this business from the bottom up. That’s the biggest challenge, not only developing a new generation of drinkers for our brands, but also a new generation of managers for the beverage business.”

And that includes the next generation of Browns, already active in the business. Bill’s daughter, Shelley Brown Gentry, works in the marketing department as director of public relations and advertising and his son, Allyn, works part-time in vending while he finishes up his college degree. “Under Bill’s leadership, Brown has put a great deal of its resources in to people development, community outreach and infrastructure upgrades,” says Pepsi’s Johnston. “He has a vision for his company and he is investing in the infrastructure and the people that will make that vision come to life. With his children, Shelley and Allyn in the business, everyone at Pepsi feels fortunate to have a third generation of Browns poised to carry this great tradition forward.”

And who can blame them for wanting to carry on the family legacy in an industry that, as Brown puts it, is truly like no other. “You’re managing so many different businesses,” he explains. “You’ve got a distribution company, you’ve got a sales company, you’ve got a marketing company, you’re running offices and you’ve got a trucking company. They’re all in one. To me, it’s the funnest business in the world.”

From Beverage World September 15, 2008