This transcript is AI generated; there may be mistakes.
I think what sets Ball Seed apart is really the people, but it's also the products.
I'm Jim Kennedy.
I work with our customers in Ball Seed in North America, and my responsibility is really everything that faces the customer.
I've been in the industry my whole life.
I grew up in a family business back in New York, and I've been with Ball for 21 years now.
Seed's important to the industry.
It brings accessibility, storability, and Seed has a great shelf life, the opportunity for automation.
It's so approachable, and it's a great mechanism for mass-producing plants throughout the world and throughout history.
I think Seed is the backbone of the horticulture industry.
We've been using it since Ball Seed has been here for over 120 years.
We're shipping Seed every day, and it's used in every greenhouse in North America and around the world.
I'm John Steinlage, North American sales manager for Ball Seed.
I grew up in and around the horticulture industry growing up in West Michigan, and I've been working in the distribution side of the industry over 12 years now.
Service is really important for what we do, and we take it very seriously.
The customer-first approach and everything we do from our call centers and getting a live operator when you call in to same-day shipping, in by five, out by seven.
And then you look at the Seed that we have from a Ball Vigor Index and how we choose the best lots to go out to our customer.
When it comes to Seed specifically, I think the depth of the inventory and the speed of the delivery and the quality of the Seed is really what sets us apart in the Seed business.
Suppliers like to partner with Ball Seed because it brings them scale and efficiency.
They also like it that we bring a high level of service to their Seed.
One of our Seeds of success at Ball is around doing the right thing always.
So when we looked at the way we were doing Seed for the past number of years and we saw there was an opportunity to do it better, from an efficiency standpoint, from taking costs out standpoint, and really to future-proof the method that we'd been using for so long.
And the accessibility of this technology that's actually sitting right behind me now, we found it to be accessible to us given what we could see on the horizon in terms of cost.
So it's really an investment in taking costs out for the future.
It allows us to be faster, to grow, and have more capacity to perhaps add more SKUs in the future, where they can have different varieties and more availability.
It allows us to be in stock.
Peak of the season, we can get more orders out in the same day.
The ultimate goal is investing for the future and how we can service our customers better throughout the year at all times.
How far back should we go?
You know, you think about that from the copper spoons back in 1905, 1910, you know, doing the weights and measures by actual spoons and scales.
And there's elements of that you can still see today.
But the evolution here at Ball from the way we've embraced technology and modernized things as we go.
For our customers ordering seed, it's the same.
They can order via calling our office, calling their sales rep, ordering on WebTrack, easy order upload.
You know, whatever way they have been ordering will be the same for them.
Where things will change is on how we're delivering the seed and how we're picking the seed.
So we've gone from a grocery store method where we shop the shelves, and pick the seed for the order to where the seed now comes to the person who's packing that order for them to pack and ship that same day.
The future is bright for seed, for Ball seed and for our customers.
The opportunities that are available from seed to expand our packet sizes to serve the smallest customers in the industry better by looking at our skew count.
Maybe there's a variety of zinnias or a variety of sunflowers that a cut flower grower would really like access to and they need 100 count in that seed or they need 50 count in that seed.
I think we have the opportunity to serve that customer better in the future.
And if we look on the scale of customers who are looking to make every square inch and every square meter in their operations count, you can count on Ball Seed in the future to deliver on that.
If every square inch matters, then every seed matters.
And you can count on Ball Seed to deliver on that.
As we do now, but even better in the future as we continue to pursue innovation through that lifelong learning and that forever pursuit of coloring the world.