“We’re still about the people, which makes us about the customer.”
— Rusty Mathis, general manager of Ben E. Keith Mid-South.
BEN E. KEITH FOODS UNDERSTANDS its customers’ needs, and the Mid-South Distribution Center was built to meet and exceed them. Starting in the administrative offices, customers know they’re speaking with a real person when they call Mid-South’s local buying staff, because Ben E. Keith Foods wants to be the local choice. Yvette Parker, director of marketing for Ben E. Keith Foods Mid-South, said calls are not outsourced to an offcampus call center, but instead received by onsite employees who are able to help customers find solutions quickly and efficiently. “We hear all of the time how reassuring it is for our customers to know that most anything can be solved in a single call,” Parker said. And at the Mid-South Distribution Center, collaborative working environments — assessed and approved by the Herman Miller Living Office workplace concept — encourage teamwork and transparency among the staff, ensuring that customers are served by a team that’s happy to come to work and communicates and coordinates to best serve their customers.
Rusty Mathis, general manager of Ben E. Keith Mid-South, said people are at the center of what the company does. “We’re named after an individual and we’re still family-owned,” Mathis said. “We’re still about the people, which makes us about the customer.” It’s this emphasis on the humanity of the customers they serve and the people they employ that sets Ben E. Keith Foods apart.
The Mid-South Distribution Center is home to a full-time health care specialist.
WHEN CUSTOMERS WORK WITH BEN E. KEITH FOODS, they’re working with a team of people dedicated to helping them succeed, but not just in distribution. The Mid-South Distribution Center is home to a full-time health care specialist and dietician who offers nutritional analysis, child care programs and menu automation services; a full-time technology specialist who offers onsite and over-the-phone training with the company’s online ordering system, ACH payment system and route tracker; and a special ordering partner with access to over 40,000 products, including organic, gluten-free, GMO-free and local products. They also offer a menu solution program, menu development, and menu engineering and design, and their experts in produce, dairy, seafood, pork, beef, poultry, paper goods, chemicals, equipment and supplies are available to help customers with their specific needs.
THE MID-SOUTH DISTRIBUTION CENTER is also cooking up solutions for customers in the facility’s test kitchen. Their onsite chef leads cooking demonstrations, helps with menu planning and works to produce countless combinations of the products that Ben E. Keith Foods offers. The test kitchen is also used for employee and community gatherings as a common space to congregate, eat and learn. Customers can reserve the test kitchen to use for training purposes or demonstrations as well. A live feed from the test kitchen can also be streamed into the large conference room on the facility’s first floor, which was built to offer a space for customers and community partners to lead meetings, trainings and demonstrations. The space was designed to accommodate different types and sizes of groups, so it can be split into three rooms or used as one large space. The Mid-South Distribution Center was built to help support customers’ businesses because Ben E. Keith Foods knows that when its customers succeed, communities succeed, too.
Ben E. Keith Foods knows that when customers succeed, communities succeed, too.