What started as a part-time position at a gas station in high school turned into a successful and vital role as a category manager at Worcester, Mass.-based Nouria Energy for Ben Brooks, whose convenience store/petroleum industry career spans roughly 25 years.
As Nouria’s category manager of cigarettes, other tobacco products (OTP), automotive, lottery and store services, Brooks is responsible for keeping Nouria, which operates 151 stores in New England, up to date on the continuously changing landscape of some of the c-store industry’s staple sellers.
For his dedication to his categories, drive to work with the frequent shifts in the marketplace and more, CStore Decisions is recognizing Ben Brooks as a Category Management Leader.
“I am excited to continue implementing our 2023 plans that are innovative and will differentiate us in the industry. I am proud to be a part of many exciting changes as well as part of the incredible growth journey happening at Nouria,” said Brooks.
A 25-Year C-Store Story
Presently, Brooks is responsible for the overall strategic planning, execution, evaluation and success of his categories. This includes pricing, product assortment, planogramming, program negotiations and compliance. He also represents Nouria in government affairs related to tobacco regulations.
At the start of his career, however, Brooks worked odd jobs at gas stations in Maine.
“A part-time high school job turned into a management role, which I held for several years before moving over to convenience store wholesale distribution sales,” said Brooks. “Three years as an account manager for Nouria was how I initially built a relationship with this organization, so it was a natural fit when a new opportunity presented itself on their team.”
One of Brooks’ joys from this position is being challenged with the complexity of the tobacco category. His duties require him to be current on his industry knowledge and the newest trends. Additionally, he must stay incredibly agile when planning for possible regulatory changes.
“For example, I am currently planning multiple product assortment scenarios, each dependent on how local, state and federal governments rule on pending regulations. There is never a dull moment for sure,” Brooks said.
A Collaborative Team
Brooks attributes Nouria’s culture and values as one of the primary reasons he enjoys his role.
“Our company is all about people, and it reflects in the people I work with. The level of professionalism and collaboration that is ingrained throughout the organization is phenomenal,” he said.
He included spending time at the stores collaborating with the front-line teams to ensure the chain is creating programs that can be successfully executed as an example of the effort the team puts into working well with each other.
“We are a passionate team, and we have fun while making sure that we give our guests the best possible retail experience,” Brooks added.
One of the projects Brooks has been involved with during his tenure at Nouria is Tobacco Computer Assisted Ordering. He had noticed Nouria was carrying large amounts of inventory unnecessarily, the assortments were not as accurate as they should be, and the stores had longer weeks of inventory on hand than needed.
As a response, he led the Computer Assisted Ordering Project from start to finish along with Nouria’s information technology and operations teams. The project enabled Nouria to use analytics to suggest item-level quantities, resulting in a reduction of labor tasks, out-of-stocks and average days of supply on hand.
Technology still has room to improve, however, as Brooks noted data analytics can be a challenge to category managers.
“It could be too much data or not enough data or not having the correct tools to analyze the information. One thing I love about Nouria is our leadership team’s vision to always look for new and improved technology to help us run the day-to-day business,” he said.
To combat this, Nouria is always researching new ways to leverage technology to better analyze the business and bring modern solutions to improve the guest experience. Brooks noted examples include using a relatively simple pricing/space optimization tool or a more cutting-edge artificial intelligence tool.
“I have no doubt that 2023 will be another banner year for the company,” Brooks said.