George Lane came up through purchasing before he ever ran a marketing program. It’s why he treats marketing like a P&L — and delivers value he can actually measure.
George Lane didn’t set out to be a marketer. A friend help recruit him into a foodservice distributor in Birmingham, AL in 1999, to fill a role in the purchasing department. George stayed in that role for seven years. Wood Fruitticher is a fourth-generation foodservice distributor, focused on independent restaurants, C-stores, education and healthcare. Their service area includes Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, and Tennessee.
Working in purchasing, marketing was a side project he picked up to help out. Then it clicked. “There was a period of time where we realized that marketing could become its own thing,” he says. “And so, I made the leap, and I’ve been doing it ever since.” Twenty-seven years into his career, he runs marketing for Wood Fruitticher — and he’s one of the sharpest thinkers I’ve met on the purpose of a distributor’s marketing department.
Part of what makes Lane different is where he sits. “In the marketing world and foodservice, you sit in between purchasing and sales,” he says. His job is to make sure the work reaches someone — a sales rep who closes more because of it, an operator who runs a better restaurant because of it. And if it isn’t landing, he changes it. “If you’re only reaching one, let’s do something differently and see if we can reach two or three or ten or twenty the next time.” Measure who you’re reaching, then adjust: that’s the through-line of everything he builds.
It’s why he doesn’t treat marketing as a cost center. Lane runs his department as “a business inside the business,” with its own receivables, deliverables, and selling cycle — dozens of programs and hundreds of participating vendors, tracked across a sprawling spreadsheet matrix. His colleagues tease him that he only works the few months before the food show. The reality is a year-round operation built on one non-negotiable principle: every program has to deliver measurable value to the vendor who paid for it. He’s seen the other model — the cash grab, the program that overpromises and quietly under-delivers. “I don’t know if some distributors really follow through on what they said they were going to do,” he says. “We certainly take a lot of pride in doing that here, making sure that we deliver value to our vendors.”
Technology has made that value easier to prove. Wood Fruitticher’s e-commerce platform reads text messages, transcribes voicemails, and even lets a rep photograph a handwritten order and have the system build it automatically. But Lane doesn’t talk about it like a gadget; he sees what it frees up. For years, the reps were, in his honest telling, “order takers first and salesmen second.” Now, he says, “our salespeople are finding themselves with more time to actually sell.” It’s the same test he applies to a marketing program: a tool only matters if the people in the field will actually use it.
Ask him what makes his team work and he doesn’t reach for tactics. “I just do my best to elevate them,” he says. “If I’m helping them to succeed, then we’re all succeeding.” He credits the latitude he was given early on and feels he owes his people the same. The hallmark of Wood Fruitticher is to treat employees like family and offer support, versus a more corporate environment.
So, what does he tell someone entering foodservice? He waves off the canned answers — work hard, be honest — as table stakes. His real advice is the thread running through his whole career: find a way to do what you love and put yourself in a revenue-generating position. “Whether you’re in purchasing and the decisions you make help the company make money, or you run a marketing program like I do — position yourself where you can help the company succeed.”
It’s telling that a marketer would frame his own discipline in terms of the P&L. But that’s exactly why George is worth studying. In an industry full of programs that promise eyeballs and deliver invoices, George Lane runs the rare kind that can show you the receipts.