Miami location helps Nickey Gregory Co. cover the Southeast with overnight service
Miami location helps Nickey Gregory Co. cover the Southeast with overnight service
Headquartered in Atlanta, the Nickey Gregory Co. opened its second location in Miami in 2010 and business has boomed ever since. The next phase of growth goes beyond U.S. borders with a new export program to the Caribbean islands.
“We’re dipping our toes into the export side of the business, so far it’s worked out pretty well,” said Robert Briggs, general manager and vice president of the Miami operation. “We’re able to pick and choose who we want to call on and with the handful of people we’ve sent product to so far it has worked out very well. You have to be careful who you do business with, but we’ve been very fortunate up to now to choose who we want to call on as the business grows.”
President Nickey Gregory hit on the idea for a Miami location when “we were down there working with a customer and noticed there really wasn’t an all-around wholesaler there. Even our customer had nobody to buy from locally who wasn’t their competition,” Gregory said. “You had a lot of companies that did specialty items but nobody really did the whole thing.”
In the case of the Nickey Gregory Co., “the whole thing” includes procurement, delivery and repacking, all self-contained, as well as the company’s own “Cheryl’s Best” label products. It’s also home to a fleet of company trucks that allows pinpoint control and overnight deliveries throughout the Southeast — not to mention burning up the road from Atlanta to Miami.
With the Caribbean program, that reach is going to continue to lengthen and the deal is also starting to involve the Atlanta headquarters.
“It’s going to become a very big part of our business,” Briggs said. “There are a few people that we are actually calling on that, even though they’re down in the islands, their product ships from Jacksonville. So now we’re able to get the Atlanta division involved a little — they’re much closer to Jacksonville than we are. So it’s gone from just being a south Florida/Miami division thing to hollering out to Atlanta, ‘Hey we could use your help here and they’re stepping up to the plate.’”
So far deliveries have gone to St. Thomas, the Bahamas and Suriname (south of the islands on the South American continent).
“That’s where we’ve stretched out so far,” Briggs said. “And the customers we’ve dealt with so far have asked for more than produce — we’re researching buying meats, poultry, toilet paper, napkins, you name it — anything they ask for if it’s within our grasp and realm we do it. Rather than just be a consolidator, we want to be a one-stop shop — Mountain Dew, Pepsi, candy bars, bubble gum — the boat’s going that way so the more packages you can fit on there the more power to it. It’s interesting trying to source that stuff but it’s been a very smooth process.”
