A $6 billion logistics CEO credits an ice cream flavor with helping him understand why customers need fresh innovation
An ice-cream conundrum planted the seeds for breakthrough innovation at the 92-year-old company.
- Ryder System CEO Robert Sanchez led the transformation of a nearly century-old trucking and logistics company by applying a lesson he learned as a teenager about ice cream. The key, according to Sanchez, lies in challenging the “we’ve always done it this way” method of thinking and focusing on the way customer needs have evolved.
Ryder System, with $12.6 billion in revenue, is a leading provider of logistics and transportation services with more than 50,000 employees in North America operating a fleet of more than 250,000 trucks. It’s come a long way since it was founded in 1933 by James Ryder with a single Model A Ford truck and a $35 down payment.
But the Ryder board, about a decade ago, wanted CEO Robert Sanchez to focus on innovation and how to lead the company beyond the core strategy and services that had sustained it for decades. The answer, for Sanchez, had its roots in a job he worked every weekend as a teenager: scooping ice cream at Carvel.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Sanchez worked at a Carvel ice cream shop in Miami during a time the city saw an influx of Cuban immigrants. Cuban customers would stop into the store and ask if Carvel carried a flavor called mamey (mah-MAY) ice cream. The creamy Caribbean fruit has a delicate but firm texture like a papaya, but tastes like a delicious pumpkin pie. Kids grow up eating it fresh or in desserts, and it’s often blended into ice cream.
“Folks would come into Carvel and ask if we had mamey, and obviously we didn’t have mamey because we’re Carvel, and they don’t have mamey,” Sanchez told Fortune. “So the owner of the ice cream store kept trying to lobby Carvel to make mamey ice cream, but they wouldn’t.”
Disappointed customers would leave Carvel and go across the street to the Cuban restaurant to get their mamey ice cream fix. Finally, the store owner had enough.
“One day, the owner of the ice cream store got upset and he said, ‘You know what?
I’m gonna make my own ice cream,’” Sanchez recalled. “So he went, and he bought mamey at the store and he mixed it with the Carvel ice cream mix and he created Carvel mamey ice cream.”
Within two weeks, it was the third-best selling ice cream in the shop.
“It’s what people wanted—they wanted mamey,” said Sanchez. “Carvel actually has great ice cream and you mix that with the right flavor and it sold great.”
Fast forward to about 10 years ago and the Ryder board was pressing Sanchez about innovation, pointing out that the company was still selling essentially the same services Jim Ryder had launched decades earlier. With mamey on his mind, Sanchez led Ryder to innovate by combining existing capabilities in new ways to solve customers’ problems.
“This guy, it’s not like he split the atom, but he invented Carvel mamey ice cream by putting these two things together and giving the customers what they wanted,” Sanchez said. “We at Ryder keep selling vanilla and chocolate, but maybe there are customers that want something different.”
The company launched an e-commerce fulfillment business, which was an entirely new area for Ryder; a mobile maintenance business; and technology to track customer freight that it didn’t have before. Sanchez said the company also launched what he described as “the first Airbnb for trucks,” which ultimately didn’t work out as expected, but the company pivoted.
“We now have a muscle for developing new products and services and innovating,” he said, which is similar to what his former boss at Carvel did with mamey ice cream.
“You’re not inventing the next iPhone, but you’re putting together services in a different way to meet customers’ needs.”
And if you think a CEO whose first job was at an ice cream store would put them off ice cream, that isn’t the case for Sanchez. Ice cream, he admits, probably has nothing to do with being fit or healthy, but it keeps him happy. Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia flavor and a chocolate and vanilla soft-serve swirl—like the kind Carvel serves—are his two favorites.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
