Sweet Success: Redwood Drives a Digital Transformation for Sugar Foods

Every consumer packaged goods (CPG) company faces significant logistics challenges today, including demand volatility, rising transportation costs, and growing customer expectations. 

Sugar Foods Corporation is no exception. This multinational food products company serves all segments of the marketplace — including foodservice, retail, specialty, and quick-service outlets. Its brands include Fresh Gourmet, Mrs. Cubbison and N’Joy, along with private-label and licensed products. Sugar Foods manufactures and distributes these products at five facilities across the United States and Mexico.

As the company's operations have expanded, so has the complexity of managing transportation. Sugar Foods faced increasing logistics challenges as the company relied on manual routing processes, paper-based scheduling, and slow, error-prone freight payment procedures. These outdated methods led to higher costs and inefficiencies, limiting the company’s ability to scale.

By implementing a cutting-edge transportation management system (TMS) from Oracle, Redwood has transformed Sugar Foods’ transportation operations, driving significant improvements in service accuracy, fleet utilization, and freight cost savings.

“Sugar Foods delivers a wide range of products to hundreds of demanding customers, including America’s largest grocery and big-box retailers,” notes Mike Hauser, Transportation Manager at Sugar Foods. “By providing an advanced transportation management solution, Redwood has helped us meet our customers’ delivery expectations and maximize the use of our assets, while significantly reducing our transportation costs.

Optimizing Transportation via Automation, Visibility, and Connectivity

To help this CPG company optimize its inbound and outbound logistics, Redwood implemented Oracle Transportation Management (OTM) across Sugar Foods’ US facilities. This solution automates critical functions, including freight procurement, rate management, and payment processing, while also providing real-time visibility into transportation operations. Redwood also created a custom integration between OTM and the company’s truck-mounted electronic logging devices (ELDs), enabling seamless communication between fleet loads and dispatch systems.

With Redwood’s solutions in place, Sugar Foods has realized a true transformation of its operations. By automating previously manual processes and utilizing advanced workflows, Sugar Foods can now capture lower carrier rates and optimize transportation routes. The digitization of its operations has also enabled Sugar Foods to leverage electronic data interchange (EDI) for tracking and invoicing, leading to more streamlined processes and further reductions in the overall freight spend.

By automating and optimizing complex transportation workflows with OTM, Redwood has enabled Sugar Foods to achieve significant cost savings, while also enhancing customer satisfaction — a sweet combination of benefits.

Read the Sugar Foods customer case study to learn more.