Kirk Soule, Blue Book Services, LLC

Kirk Soule didn’t find his way to produce through a trade show floor or a family business. He grew up on a small farm in southern Minnesota where the supply chain wasn’t an abstraction, it was morning chores. This upbringing gave him something many MBAs don’t have: an instinctive respect for what it takes to bring food from field to shelf.

His career since then has been anything but linear. After college, he landed at Target headquarters, then spent years in retail consulting, working with SuperValu, Albertsons, A&P, Southeastern Grocers, and Price Chopper.

Along the way, he sourced over $500 million in annual fresh contracts for a major retailer and led a brand launch that surpassed $50 million in sales. An MBA from Duke, completed alongside an internship at Walmart, deepened his understanding of consumer-driven demand at scale.

He made a deliberate detour outside food and retail to 3M, where he focused on innovation and absorbing best practices from a different world. One lesson that continues to resonate: bring disparate parties together with genuine mutual respect and the results can be remarkable. Case in point—accelerating production of N95 respirators at the height of Covid.

Kirk joined Blue Book in the spring of 2023, stepping into one of the industry’s most storied institutions. His quiet confidence and easygoing nature belie a fierce determination and dedication to the company and industry.

In this milestone year, we talked with Kirk about data, technology, leadership, and what it means to carry a 125-year legacy forward.

I’ve seen firsthand what technology can do when it’s used to empower people, not replace them.

Q: What factors most influenced your decision to join Blue Book?

Two things, and they’re connected. First, my roots. I grew up in food and agriculture—there’s a gravitational pull there that never really goes away. Second, and this is the one people don’t always expect, I’ve seen firsthand what technology can do when it’s used to empower people, not replace them.

My 3M experience was the proof point. Create an environment where an astrophysicist and a factory line worker genuinely learn from each other—equal respect, different expertise—and the outcome is extraordinary.

Blue Book sits at that same intersection in produce: deep industry relationships on one side, and enormous potential to transform how the industry uses information on the other. When I saw that, I stopped thinking about it as a job opportunity and started thinking about it as a mission.

Q: Was it daunting to step into such a well-established company with a highly recognized leader?

The short answer is you feel the weight of 125 years every time you make a decision. But a strong foundation makes it easier to build, not harder. I’m grateful for it. And I’d add that while change is constant in our industry, every iteration is a little different—so we need to chart our own course to best address today’s pain points.

I’d also reframe the premise a little. Jim Carr is still involved with Blue Book—he’s on the board, he was just at CPMA, and he’ll be joining us at IFPA’s Global Show this fall. Especially with this being our 125th anniversary year, this continuity means a great deal.

Jim navigated remarkable change over his tenure—the dawn of the internet, the rise of mobile technology, a global pandemic. At each of those moments, Blue Book could have fallen behind. It didn’t. That’s not an accident; that’s a reflection of his judgment and the strength of the institution he built.

Data is genuinely abundant in our industry. What’s scarce is the ability to synthesize it into an insight that drives a real decision—that gap is where money walks out the door.

Q: Let’s talk about data: where do companies leave the most money on the table when it comes to data?

Data is genuinely abundant in our industry. What’s scarce is the ability to synthesize it into an insight that drives a real decision—that gap is where money walks out the door.

I have two recent examples in mind: first, I recently spoke with a buying organization that doesn’t benchmark costs against market pricing data—they’re flying blind. The second example is a company that onboards new customers without checking their rating first—they’re taking on risk they don’t need to.

In both cases, Blue Book synthesizes reams of data to provide our partners with the insights necessary to make informed decisions. These tools exist but they’re not always used.

And I’ll be honest: that’s partly on us. It’s not enough to have the data and make it available. We need to make sure our customers know the tools exist, know how to use them, and can access them seamlessly within their existing workflows. So it goes both ways.

Q: Data represents one facet of a company’s insight, but its people are another – how do you ensure a workable balance?

I’d push back gently on the premise that they’re in tension, because I don’t think they are. Think about email. When it became widespread, people worried it would degrade relationships, that something real would be lost.

What actually happened? Email changed how people communicate. It didn’t change that they communicate. Now they’re able to communicate faster and more broadly than ever before. Are there trade-offs? Absolutely. But email isn’t the enemy of relationships.

Data is on the same arc. It increases transparency, makes it easier to form an informed opinion, and when something changes—a supplier quality issue, a shift in payment trends—data lets you get ahead of it and communicate faster. It’s not a threat to the relationship, it’s being a better partner.

The technology should be invisible—the outcome should be the story.

Q: As a proponent of AI, where is it overhyped vs. truly transformative? Where does AI not belong?

The overhype lives wherever AI is a solution in need of a problem. That’s true of every technology cycle, but AI is particularly susceptible right now because the novelty is so compelling.

Here’s a useful test: take a trade show—arguably the most relationship-driven event in our industry.

And yet there are real AI use cases right there on the floor: researching prospects before you walk in, identifying who you actually need to talk to, role-playing through a customer’s pain points so you show up sharper, building a follow-up strategy before the flight home.

All of this makes the human interaction better. Where it fails? “Come look at this cool app we built.” Nobody cares. The technology should be invisible—the outcome should be the story.

Q: Blue Book has leaned heavily into protecting its members from fraud, so what’s the future of fraud prevention?

This is one of the most urgent issues facing our industry, and it’s not getting enough attention.

Bad actors are using technology against us. They spin up fraudulent personas quickly, creating convincing imitations of real companies and real people, and by the time anyone catches on, real damage has been done.

Tens of millions of dollars are lost to fraudsters in our industry every year. Companies go out of business. Trust in the supply chain erodes. And ultimately, those costs get passed on to the consumer.

We’ve built a tool that can tell you within 15 seconds whether you’re dealing with the real company or an imitation. This isn’t a sales pitch—it’s free to all of our members.

We built it because the industry needs it. Fraud will keep evolving, which makes it all the more important for us as an industry to keep raising our game.

The product is never done—you release, you get feedback, you iterate.

Q: Tell us about a decision you got wrong, and what it taught you.

If you ask my family, I’m usually wrong. But in seriousness, the most instructive decisions have been related to products.

We’ve removed features we assumed customers no longer needed, such as vCards, for example, which let users download a contact’s information directly into Outlook. Turns out, people loved that. We heard about it and brought the feature back in our next update.

On the flip side, we launched weather alerts—triggered notifications sent by email or text when precipitation or temperature crosses a user-defined threshold. We thought customers would find that incredibly useful. Usage told a different story.

The lessons in both cases are the same. First, the product is never done—you release, you get feedback, you iterate.

Second, feedback is helpful but it isn’t globally representative. Not every customer feels the same way about a given feature, and you have to be careful not to treat the loudest voices as the whole audience.

Third—and this is the one I think about most—developing a product is an art. It needs to have a perspective. You can’t build something for everyone, because a product that tries to be everything ends up being nothing.

Q: What do you enjoy most about your job? What’s most difficult?

I love talking to our customers. I recently spent a few days visiting customers at Hunts Point, and it was the highlight of my month.

There’s nothing like sitting across from someone who has been using Blue Book for days or for decades, who has the print edition on their desk, who depends on it every day. That’s not abstract to me, it’s everything.

The hardest part is a tension that doesn’t go away: how do we innovate without making loyal customers feel like they’re losing something, while proving to newcomers that Blue Book is cutting-edge?

Those are two very different audiences, and every product decision has to serve both. That’s genuinely difficult; it’s also what makes the job interesting.

At Blue Book, we’re standing on the shoulders of giants: 125 years of history, relationships, and precedent-setting in this industry.

Q: Anything else you’d like to share with our readers?

At Blue Book, we’re standing on the shoulders of giants: 125 years of history, relationships, and precedent-setting in this industry.

As we celebrate this anniversary, the goal isn’t just continuity, it’s to pick up the mantle of previous generations and lead. That’s never been more important than right now. 

The pace of change in this industry is unlike anything I’ve seen. Consolidation, price inflation, rising consumer expectations, AI—it’s all happening at once, and it’s creating complexity at every level of the supply chain.

Blue Book has navigated seismic shifts before and come out stronger. Our job is to make sure that happens again. We’re not just watching these forces, we have a role to play in actively shaping how our industry navigates them.