Mary Thomas Email and Phone Number

Since 1995, Grocery Marketing Solutions Inc. (GMS) has offered grocery marketing consulting, Food/Beverage Demonstrations, and Event Planning to companies looking to boost sales and product awareness. • Perform national, regional, store, and self-directed demonstrations• Prepare food for demonstrations, set-up and clean-up responsibilities • Creatively merchandise, garnish, and display products• Educate customers while selling products• Follow established food safety, cleaning, and maintenance procedures

Position included calling on independent natural retailers in Houston area, and Whole Foods Markets to sell, educate, and service natural and specialty accounts to ensure client standards were met and volume increased. • Advised leadership on a weekly basis on market conditions, customer changes, upcoming selling events and competitive activity within assigned geography • Sold brand strategies based on direction from the Client • Developed leveraging relationships with key influence and decision makers in assigned markets to ensure assigned sales growth including franchise owners, store owners, distributors and other key managers in the market• Met client and company objectives by maintaining full distribution on all authorized SKU's• Insured all authorized client items were represented on the shelf, products had accurate and complete tags, and made certain that un-saleable or out-of-code product were removed • Achieved client’s goals and objectives by effectively managing stores

In charge of the marketing efforts, campaigns and so forth, choosing the direction that the company was moving in, overall themes, important purposes, goals and points of focus, and other tasks for the daily marketing needs of the store.• Wrote and distributed press releases to promote awareness of store events, strategic partnerships and external event sponsorships• Developed mutually beneficial promotional relationships with local schools, businesses and community organizations• Served as advocate and information source in the store for regional marketing programs and graphics standards• Developed and implemented external marketing and advertising programs• Researched competition and local community, summarizing findings for store and regional leadership• Executed store level merchandising, events, media and community relations, local advertising and promotions• Insured that national and regional store marketing and public relations programs were executed effectively• Coordinated interviews, store tours, local media store photo shoots, all internal marketing and promotional efforts, community relations, public relations, in-store sign collateral, information, events and demos• Developed marketing strategy and written action plans • Managed store marketing budgets and donation process • Created plans for store level holiday merchandising, events, media and community relations, local advertising and promotions• Followed through on all customer questions and requests. • Maintained accurate retail pricing, signage and inventory of promotional products• Knowledgeable of new products and their placement; ensured product transfers were done promptly and correctly; aware of product availability, preparation techniques, storage requirements, and nutritional aspects • Visited competitive markets on a regular basis and reacted to current industry trends