Benson Foods - “We Feed America”
Benson Foods, Inc. is an American grocery company founded in 1933 and headquartered in Sacramento, CA. With 1,872 stores and 230,000 employees, the company is the third-largest supermarket chain in North America after Kroger and Albertsons. Much of this growth has come in the last two years after acquiring Long Wharf Food and Drug.
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Head of Product Development:
Our company is eighty years old but we’ve been doing a lot to stay cutting edge. We’ve acquired a new app that lets customers build grocery lists based on their health information and goals, called WellBenson. My team’s main goals are to make sure that our customer experience is unified between Long Wharf and Benson brands, and to increase customer interaction with our apps.
Key Questions/Thoughts/Concerns:
Security is not my job, it slows us down.
I like Cisco fine, but want freedom to work wherever is fastest, cheapest and easiest. Will Cisco security play nice with apps built all over the cloud?
My number one priority is making our technology products seamless and pleasant to use.
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CTO:
The Long Wharf acquisition has been a big hit for our brand and our revenue, but really hard on our Technology teams and systems. Combining two systems, unifying supply chains, and starting to integrate pharmacy would always be difficult, but during the pandemic it’s impossible. And, like everyone, we’re facing a pretty severe labor shortage in IT.
Key Questions/Thoughts/Concerns:
Adding pharmacies has added regulatory oversight and data privacy problems we’ve never dealt with before and that we aren’t built for;
Our senior management and CEO doesn’t understand the scope of what could go wrong with a security breach;
I like Cisco, but don't think of them in this space.
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CEO:
Benson has done very well under my tenure, and the Long Wharf acquisition was a crowning achievement. As a publicly traded company, we always have to look for growth. We’re now everywhere in the US, and much of where we see growth continuing is growing our small footholds in Canada and Mexico, as well as expanding our pharmacy business. I’m interested in security because we’ve had some small hiccups that have hurt vendors and subcontractors in our supply chain, but it’s not my focus. I know that we need to stay innovative, particularly as Amazon moves more into the grocery space.
Key Questions/Thoughts/Concerns:
My main security concerns are keeping the supply chain moving and staying out of the news;
My priority is Canada and Mexico. Does security have anything to do with that?
How much security do we really need?