Core-Mark, a Performance Food Group company, is one of North America’s largest distributors to the convenience-retail industry. From snacks and tobacco to automotive supplies and health-and-beauty care, Core-Mark moves 36,000-plus SKUs through 45 distribution centers to 51,000 stores in the United States and Western Canada. Core-Mark employs more than 12,000 employees across its facilities.
Success Story
Kern-Marke
Space planning, Planogram generator
Core-Mark boosts planogram coverage by 40% with Blue Yonder, enabling faster, smarter store shelving execution
Das Unternehmen
Die geschäftliche Herausforderung
Core-Mark’s rapid growth—fueled by acquisitions such as Eby-Brown—left the company’s category management operations fragmented. Store-specific planograms were built in multiple legacy systems, each with its own product hierarchy and back-office interface. Analysts could not share libraries, talent was siloed, and demand for planograms doubled as retailers discovered the value of data-driven assortments. Without a unified category management system, the company struggled to deliver consistent, data-driven assortments at the pace and scale required to meet the shelving needs of its expanding retail footprint.
Die Lösung
Core-Mark selected Blue Yonder space planning, leveraging its planogram generator feature to standardize its planogram process. Analysts can now log in, retrieve store-specific fixture data, and generate shelf-ready planograms within minutes—regardless of which back-office system the retailer uses. By standardizing planogram creation with Blue Yonder, Core-Mark significantly accelerated its time-to-shelf while ensuring consistency across its diverse retail network. This not only improved the company’s operational efficiency for its planogram processes, but also unlocked collaboration across its category management teams, enabling scalable growth without sacrificing brand integrity.
Additionally, Core-Mark brought together analysts from its corporate team and acquired companies to participate in joint Blue Yonder training sessions. These sessions built a shared skill set and common language while allowing the team to establish separate but interconnected product libraries that preserved each brand’s identity.
“With Blue Yonder’s category management capabilities, our retail customers don’t even think about going to any other distribution service.”
–Jim Hatchtel, Senior Director, Category Management, Core-Mark
From fragmentation to one source of shelf truth
The acquisition of Eby-Brown doubled the size of Core-Mark’s category management team overnight, while also doubling the number of disparate category management tools in its use. Analysts who previously relied on desktop-based software had to send files back and forth across multiple time zones, while newer team members favored cloud-based workflows. Without a unified category management platform, the company risked slower refresh cycles, inconsistent merchandising standards, and the loss of hard-won customers when stores could not get the localized assortments they expected.
Core-Mark chose Blue Yonder having acknowledged it to be the leader in space planning software and offering the best solution for the company’s customers. “When we looked at Blue Yonder, obviously they’ve been the known and acknowledged leader in space planning for many years. So we wanted to go with the best,” says Hatchtel. Within 18 months, Core-Mark launched a state-of-the-art Center of Excellence in Westlake, Texas, and migrated its legacy planogram data into Blue Yonder’s SaaS-based platform, which connects to a data hub built on Snowflake. Planogram processes were standardized company-wide while still allowing for region-specific customization through separate product libraries. The team created a master set of 525 unique “gold-standard” planograms, which are refreshed every quarter to stay aligned with product introductions and consumer preferences. These planograms now serve over 70 regional and national chains, along with tens of thousands of independent convenience stores.
This transformation created a single, reliable source of shelf data that feeds into corporate reporting, supplier negotiations, and store-level execution.
Delivering localized assortments at scale
Convenience stores vary widely in size and layout, and no two stores have identical footprints. With Blue Yonder, Core-Mark can tailor assortments to each location without starting from scratch. Analysts input key store attributes—such as fixture dimensions, refrigeration types, and regulatory considerations—into the system. They then generate a store-specific planogram based on the gold library of 525 planograms.
This flexibility allows Core-Mark to outperform competitors. By providing store-specific planograms, the company strengthens its customer relationships and makes it difficult for clients to consider switching to other distributors. For example, the company was able to reduce planogram turnaround time from two weeks to just three days for a 70-store Midwest chain, allowing stores to reset before the summer beverage rush. Independent operators now benefit from this same level of service, with sales reps showing planogram visuals on tablets to illustrate what shelves will look like after installation—an offering that was once limited to large chains.
Empowering a distributed workforce
With category management analysts spread across offices from Calgary to Tampa, collaboration previously posed a challenge. Before Blue Yonder, collaboration involved screen-sharing sessions, inconsistent file versions, and significant time spent reconciling updates. Now, with all analysts working in Blue Yonder, they can easily tag each other in comments, co-edit plans, and incorporate changes into quarterly refresh cycles. Internal surveys show that planogram collaboration has increased by 10% annually, freeing up time for more strategic planning and customer engagement by streamlining and automating time-consuming shelving processes.
Reaching quantifiable business impact
Blue Yonder space planning has helped improve planogram productivity, with each analyst now able to manage 40% more stores than they could before adopting the solution. Unified product hierarchies have also revealed duplicate or underperforming SKUs, allowing Core-Mark to reduce slow movers by 4% and free up shelf space for high-margin, fresh-food items. Customer retention has improved as well, with stores receiving quarterly planogram refreshes renewing distribution contracts at a rate 15% higher than those on annual update cycles. Additionally, Core-Mark can now offer performance dashboards to suppliers, improving vendor collaboration and unlocking incremental trade funds that help offset distribution costs.
Education through training
Core-Mark attributes much of its success to the training services provided by Blue Yonder. Group classes followed by one-on-one support from Blue Yonder’s professional services team helped create a learning environment where team members could align skills and feel confident in using the new system. This approach laid the groundwork for a culture of continuous improvement that is now extending into floor-planning pilots—Core-Mark’s next step in elevating its capabilities.
Continuous improvement through Blue Yonder Professional Services
Core-Mark attributes much of its success to the training services provided by Blue Yonder. During onboarding, Blue Yonder’s professional services team led training classes with a mix of experienced and newly integrated analysts. The sessions provided a space where all participants could ask questions and develop confidence in a shared set of processes. By the end of training, all analysts had developed the ability to pull SKU-level velocity data from Core-Mark’s Snowflake environment, match items to a normalized product hierarchy, and auto-generate planograms that accounted for the unique fixture constraints often found in convenience store formats.
“What united us and what made it really work for everybody was the educational classes from Blue Yonder. We were able to have team sessions where we worked directly with a Blue Yonder training leader to teach us a particular part of the software. And that facilitated engagement and deep understanding. The training with Blue Yonder has made me excited about the direction we’re able to go in,” says Hatcthtel.
Group classes followed by one-on-one support from Blue Yonder’s professional services team helped create a learning environment where team members could align skills and feel confident in using the new system. This approach laid the groundwork for a culture of continuous improvement that is now extending into floor-planning pilots—Core-Mark’s next step in elevating its capabilities.
Looking ahead to AI-driven merchandising
Core-Mark’s vision is to serve more than 70 growing convenience-store chains and nearly 35,000 independent operators with Blue Yonder, and to provide these retailers with the same level of precision and customization offered to national accounts. The company is already evaluating how Blue Yonder’s generative-AI agents can enhance its capabilities by proposing micro-assortments based on hyper-local trends, identifying planogram compliance issues through store images, and reducing the time analysts spend on manual data processing.
Core-Mark is optimistic on the role these AI assistants will play, citing that they will allow analysts to focus more on customer relationships and strategic planning while improving the quality and timeliness of planogram delivery. By incorporating AI into its quarterly planogram refresh cycle, Core-Mark expects to reduce manual data preparation, compress insight-to-execution timelines from weeks to days, and unlock new sales opportunities by capturing niche and regional preferences in real time.
With Blue Yonder’s robust space planning solution and emerging AI tools, Core-Mark is not only standardizing the present—it’s also shaping the future of convenience retail, one store at a time.
