2025 Category Excellence in Planogram: EG America & McLane Co. Inc.
Since 2017, McLane has provided distribution services to EG America, as well as extensive planogram support. In 2024, EG America and McLane came together for in-depth planogram development sessions, led by McLane's Center for Category Innovation (CCI). During these meetings, the companies created new planograms for EG America's candy, nutrition, salty snacks, auto, grocery, cookie/cracker, better-for-you and general merchandise categories, which were subsequently implemented in the retailer's 875-plus stores.
Because EG America wanted to quickly revamp the store layouts across its brands, the McLane CCI brought internal, vendor and broker teams together and worked through the planogram design in real time. The EG America and vendor teams each provided their volume, sales, movement and market share data for the specific categories. This allowed McLane to perform an in-depth analysis and comparison to evaluate productivity and inform upgrades to the space allocations, ensuring the planograms included high-velocity and innovative items in each set. During the development process, EG America and its vendor partners also were instrumental in highlighting opportunities and gaps in space, pack size and market share.
Over the course of two four-day in-depth sessions, McLane's category development analysts worked alongside EG America's category management team, vendors and brokers to develop multiple planograms that were rolled out to EG America's brands nationwide. The McLane team provided valuable industry data, geographical data, technical expertise and space planning software to facilitate the development of the new planograms and assortments.
The collaboration between McLane and EG America proved to be successful following the implementation of the new planograms, as EG America experienced a 12% lift in the impacted categories over the previous year.
Click here for the full winners' list for the 2025 Convenience Store News Category Excellence Awards.