Gillette Pepsi Companies operates three Pepsi-Cola franchises across Western Wisconsin, Southern Minnesota and Northern Iowa, serving more than one million consumers. As the tenth-largest Pepsi bottler in the United States, Gillette manages a complex mix of manufacturing, distribution and local market execution across multiple territories.

Over time, that complexity intensified from scale, environmental and operational change.

A decade ago, Gillette Pepsi relied on weekly and monthly paper reports to understand performance. The information was dense, static and rarely used by the people who needed it most.

As consumer preferences shifted and the beverage portfolio expanded beyond traditional soft drinks, leadership recognized that delayed, static reporting was no longer viable.

The business needed a better way to understand what was happening.

Over time, Gillette’s product mix changed dramatically — from roughly 128 SKUs to more than 500, including waters, energy drinks, teas and specialty beverages.

With clearer visibility, teams could:

• Identify which products had velocity — and which didn’t
• Pull underperforming items before they eroded margin
• Double down on emerging trends at the right time

Decisions were no longer driven by intuition alone. They were reinforced with evidence.

As the business evolved, the need for consistency across divisions became more critical. National chains demanded alignment, and internal teams needed visibility into how decisions in one area affected another.

With a shared view of performance:

• Sales teams could understand customer profitability and pricing agreements
• Operations could improve delivery routes and reduce exceptions
• Finance could project revenue and margin earlier in the month
• Leadership could see trends developing — not weeks later

That speed changed how the business was managed day to day.

Gillette Pepsi didn’t lose its intuition in the local market either. In fact, it strengthened.

Those surprises helped to validate good decisions and change assumptions when necessary.

With a dependable performance foundation in place, Fareway’s teams gained the ability to work dynamically with their data instead of reacting to static outputs.

Category managers could break performance down naturally — by department, category or store — and understand what was changing and why.

For Gillette Pepsi Companies, performance improvement wasn’t about adding more systems. It was about giving people confidence that the decisions they were making were grounded in reality.

As the business continues to evolve, that confidence has become a competitive advantage.