To: Jimmy Carter
From: Jackson Freed
Date: 10/10/19
Subject:

During our meeting last week, attention was brought to the fact that per gram of potato, our prices are 4% up compared to our competitors. In the meeting, possible reasons for this discrepancy as well as possible solutions were brought up.
I have further thought about reasons for this discrepancy and have come up with a few that have not been mentioned:
•	Union vs non-union trucking companies
•	Factory location
•	Distance from farms to factory
•	Distance between farms
•	Seasonal buying: larger companies may buy in bulk at lower prices
Ideas about why we are falling behind are not worth anything if we cannot determine which factors are attributing and what implementations are feasible. That is why I would like to propose that we focus more time on analyzing other companies.
Whether in house or third party, it would be useful to know where our competitors are spending their money in order to better allocate ours in the future. Information can be collected through documents such as a company’s annual report to its shareholders. By collecting information from our competitors reports and the reports of the companies they contract, we will be able to understand what they are doing that we are not.