Task
Primo had come through a run of acquisitions. The board wanted three things at once: realise the synergies, streamline a sprawling portfolio, and raise the value of the brands that remained.
Underneath sat a harder problem. Over 60% of pre-COVID revenue came from B2B, and lockdown had just rearranged the working lives of every small business customer they served.
The company could not categorise those customers. Several acquisitions had left no coherent view of the service levels each had historically received, so one flat approach was applied to all of them. Same products, same delivery options, same way of communicating.
That was suppressing long-standing sales and closing off cross-selling entirely.
Pilot
We rebuilt the customer baseline from behavioural data: public sources and a custom survey layered over Primo’s own records, triangulated against voice of customer work, financials, call centre logs and Trustpilot scores.
Then we changed one delivery route. Measured it. Changed the next.
Not a programme. One route.
Transformation
The data produced two findings.
The first was logistical. Business customers had moved home, so deliveries had to be re-routed around work-from-home patterns instead of office parks.
The second was the one that mattered. Primo’s delivery drivers held the highest Net Promoter Scores in the entire company, and were being managed as a cost line. The people customers trusted most had the least strategic role in the business.
So we changed the role. Drivers were repositioned and retrained as Trusted Advisors, able to personalise offers, spot needs and sell credibly to people who already trusted them. That meant deliberately overlapping sales and service, two functions that had never spoken.
A third finding came out of the same interviews. Delivery flexibility alone did not satisfy anyone. How customers could talk to their supplier mattered as much as what arrived. Some wanted a live agent at any hour, others preferred text. None of it had been configurable.
There was a fourth thing, less comfortable. Primo’s delivery network reflected the diversity of the communities it served. Its senior management did not. In the summer of 2020 that gap left the company unsure what standing it had in a public conversation. Normally that moment prompts consolidation and cuts. With the NPS data in hand, management retrained instead.
Result
New portfolio. New distribution. New fleet. A brand rebuilt around the power of blue.
And a corporate mission on the health of the communities served, grounded in data from thousands of advisor conversations rather than asserted in a workshop.
The board’s stated objective was value realisation. In November 2024, Primo Water was combined with BlueTriton Brands to form Primo Brands Corporation, pro forma net sales $6.5bn.
Why it worked
Primo had a systems problem it could see: fragmented customers, incoherent service tiers, post-acquisition sprawl.
It had an empathy problem it could not. The most valuable asset in the business was already built. Thousands of people arriving at customers’ doors every week, trusted more than anyone else in the company, structurally prevented from doing anything with that trust.
No amount of systems analysis finds that. It came from asking customers what they valued, and then believing the answer.