Coca-Cola Research Councils Put Retail Labor as Top Priority
CPGs have a lot at stake when it comes to smoothly running stores. For The Coca-Cola Company, this means helping retailers recruit and retain labor has become not just a priority but rather a collective responsibility of the entire consumer goods industry.
As such, the Coca-Cola Retailing Research Councils (CCRRC) chose this year’s research studies to serve as a resource in the ongoing pursuit of a healthy retail environment.
“Retail stores are finding it increasingly difficult to attract and retain the right frontline staff as the industry grows and product and service offerings become more sophisticated,” Marvin R. Vines, VP, industry leadership, retail, at The Coca-Cola Company, tells CGT.
“The recruitment challenges and high turnover pose a threat to revenues from understaffed stores and negative customer experiences, and they generate additional costs for onboarding and retraining.”
Not only are these obstacles detrimental to store operations, but they're a hurdle for industry growth as a whole.
“The councils believe that addressing the impediments that stand in the way of the industry being viewed as an employer of choice is a collective responsibility that must be addressed by the industry,” Vines stresses. “But it also requires action by individual managers and companies to improve the workplace experience and their approaches to the acquisition, development, and retention of talent.”
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CCRRC studies typically focus on helping companies kick off important discussions about common challenges and providing practical applications of solutions. For example, in this year’s “Convenience Industry Action Plan for Becoming an Employer of Choice,” the CCRRC points to the promise of store technologies to improve retailers’ abilities to assess and address potential threats of violence, such as those that can scrape social media and other data sources, as well as AI-enabled image recognition solutions.
With the right safeguards that ensure these retail technologies are implemented ethically, they could provide scalable benefits that individual companies could not achieve. Notes the report: “Smaller operators would benefit both from help in curating which technology solutions to deploy and from collectively negotiated rates. Larger operators would benefit from an industrywide scan of nascent technologies and the sharing of common practices.”
Past studies focused on personnel management directly led to companies examining training opportunities, especially for frontline management, according to Vines. Other reports have included diagnostic tools to help retailers benchmark their company against the industry.
Companies have also used them to better focus on reducing turnover, as well as improving onboarding, offboarding, training, evaluations, and learning about emerging platforms. One collection of studies about social media resulted in multiple council members launching or expanding social media efforts inside their companies, says Vines.
“The study made top management significantly more aware of the power of social media,” he notes. “In fact, the data moved many in management to make changes, in some cases becoming personally involved in social efforts or at minimum providing the matter more personnel and financial support.”
The next council cohorts and study priorities will be selected in 2025.
- How the Coca-Cola Retail Research Councils Work
The two Coca-Cola Retail Research Councils have provided industry research to grocery and C-stores for over four decades, with the topics identified by retailers.
The CCRRC focuses on grocery retail research, while the NACS CCRRC arm focuses on convenience store research. Each council includes 15-20 retailers who have been invited and committed to a set term to spearhead the research. Members are selected to represent a variety of operating styles, store types and ownership, including both large chains and independent operators.
Their body of work includes more than 60 reports on such areas as growth strategies, shopper marketing, safety, technology and social media, food industry trends, and labor issues, among others. Each council determines its own research projects and identifies consultants who are hired to implement the projects, and Vines stressed that Coca-Cola does not influence any of the project decisions made by the Councils.
