I love history. I love Charleston. I love pineapple. I love Supply Chain.
I know you’re already asking yourself... “and what does the poinsettia have to do with all of this?”
Look around your office. Every phone, every monitor, every piece of furniture from the metal, to the fabric, to the plastic almost certainly took a trip through a port, a warehouse, a truck, a DC, and a dozen decision points you never saw.
Just imagine one gateway like the Port of Charleston. In the last year, Charleston alone moved millions of containers and well over a hundred thousand finished vehicles that ended up in driveways across America (BMW, Scout Motors, and Volvo Cars, thank you for making SC "home"). And yet, for most in supply chain and procurement, there’s a strange truth: you depend on systems you don’t fully see.
That blind spot is where this story starts. And it begins with a pineapple. Say what?!?
The Pineapple on the Fence
In Charleston’s golden age of sail, when a sea captain returned safely from the Caribbean after months at sea, he didn’t post about it on LinkedIn. He speared a pineapple on his fence.
The pineapple was rare, expensive, and brutally hard to move without it rotting. It had traveled thousands of miles. It had survived storms, disease, spoilage, and occasionally pirates. When neighbors saw that pineapple, they knew:
• The voyage succeeded.
• The captain had navigated risk.
• There was something new and valuable to share.
That pineapple was the original supply chain KPI dashboard — one object that said: “The system worked. People you’ll never meet did their job. You can trust what arrived.”
Fast-forward 300 years. We’ve replaced pineapples on fences with tracking numbers in emails, EDI messages, IoT sensors, and real-time control towers. We can tell you container positions down to the minute and optimize truck routes on the fly.
But we’ve also optimized away the moment, that pause where we acknowledge how fragile and remarkable the journey really is. And when COVID hit, reality reminded everyone just how fragile things were.
COVID, Fragility, and the Myth of “Efficient = Strong”
For decades, the dominant playbook has been:
• Single-source where possible.
• Chase the lowest landed cost.
• Run lean.
• Keep inventory minimal.
• Trust that things will “just work.”
It did work, right up until it didn’t. When COVID arrived, ports closed or jammed, factories locked down, and labor and raw materials vanished from systems that had been optimized for speed and cost, not for shock absorption. Furniture retailers found warehouses empty. Manufacturers saw lines idle because one screw, one chip, one resin was unavailable. Life sciences companies had active ingredients stuck on the wrong continent.
The lesson was loud:
• Efficiency is not resilience.
• Predictability is not robustness.
• A beautiful forecast is not a backup plan.
Interestingly, the organizations that navigated the storm best did not just “get lucky.” Many had multiple suppliers in different regions , local or regional partners they could tap quickly, and strong relationships that allowed them to call in favors and rework contracts on the fly.
In other words, they had already been planting pineapples by investing in relationships and redundancy before the crisis.
Charleston’s Old Secret: Relationships Before Crisis
Charleston has been a gateway city for centuries. In the 1700s, fortunes were made and lost on a single crop and a single voyage. Rice, indigo, and other commodities went out; goods from around the Atlantic world came back in.
The fragile players were the ones who bet everything on one crop, one buyer, or one shipping lane. A single storm, drought, or embargo could wipe them out. The resilient players worked differently. They traded multiple crops, cultivated several buyers in different cities, and spread risk across routes and partners. They built relationships before crisis.
Even the famous poinsettia ties in: Joel Poinsett, a Charleston-born diplomat, went to Mexico and brought back a winter-blooming plant that no one in Charleston had seen before. Beyond being a fun Christmas decoration, it symbolizes something fundamental for me as a supply chain professional for more than 20 years:
• A willingness to explore new sources.
• Curiosity about unfamiliar partners.
• The value of bringing a new capability back home.
The pineapple on the fence and the poinsettia on the front porch were early “visibility signals.” They told the community: “We’ve invested in distant relationships. The system survived. Here’s the proof.” Today, we have far more data, but the principle hasn’t changed.
Today’s Reality: Gateway Cities, Global Chains, Local Options
Now zoom back to the present. Ports like Charleston are still gateways, only now they’re moving containerized global trade instead of wood crates and hand-written manifests. Millions of TEUs flow through each year, supporting automotive, aerospace, industrial, retail, and tech supply chains across entire regions.
Supply chain and procurement teams face a paradox:
• Globalization gives incredible choice — but also shared vulnerabilities.
• Hyper-efficiency lowers costs — but also lowers shock tolerance.
• Digital visibility is better than ever — but doesn’t automatically translate into better decisions or stronger relationships.
And while teams chase unit cost reductions, there’s often a massive, underused lever sitting in plain sight: Who you choose to build with.
Right now, across regions like South Carolina and the broader U.S., there are underutilized local manufacturers, diverse suppliers with niche capabilities, and hyperlocal partners that can shorten lead times, reduce risk, and support community resilience.
Yet many are invisible to large enterprises because the default filters are:
• “We’ve always used this vendor.”
• “They’re on the approved list.”
• “They’re big, so they must be safe.”
The result: global dependencies that look efficient on a spreadsheet but crumble when foreign policy, pandemics, or natural disasters shift.
The Data Behind “Building with Someone New”
Here’s where it gets interesting for supply chain and procurement professionals who think in terms of ROI, risk, and metrics. Studies examining supply base diversity and local sourcing have found:
• Organizations with strong supply base diversity programs can generate over double the procurement ROI compared to peers that don’t.
• Redirecting spend to diverse and small suppliers has been shown to drive both higher profitability and measurable community benefits through job creation and local economic activity.
• Local sourcing can reduce transportation costs, shorten lead times, improve quality control, and increase visibility, especially in sectors that were hammered by global disruptions.
• Case studies on strategic sourcing show that nearshoring, multi-shoring, and deeper supplier collaboration directly improve resilience and recovery times after shocks.
In other words, resilience and profitability are not opposites. Done right, they reinforce each other. This brings us to the core idea.
The Idea Worth Spreading: Build With Someone New
Supply chain resilience is no longer about having more safety stock. It’s about who you choose to build with. The next competitive advantage belongs to the organizations that intentionally build with new, local, and diverse partners before disruption hits.
“Build with someone new” is not a slogan. It’s a design principle:
• When onboarding a new supplier, look beyond the usual suspects.
• When refreshing a category strategy, deliberately include local or diverse candidates.
• When designing a network, consider hyperlocal capabilities as a resilience node, not just a “nice-to-have.”
This doesn’t mean abandoning global suppliers or long-term partners. It means adding redundancy where it matters most, creating optionality in categories that are mission-critical, and turning relationship-building into a core resilience tactic, not an afterthought. Think of it as upgrading your pineapple. Instead of one visible sign that “the ship made it,” you build a network of partners who can each carry part of the load when one ship doesn’t.
What This Looks Like in Practice
For professionals in supply chain and procurement, “build with someone new” can translate into concrete steps:
Step #1: Run a “risk-first” category review. Identify categories where you have single-source suppliers, high disruption exposure (geopolitical, climate, concentration), long lead times, and weak alternatives.
Step #2: Use local and diversity directories as strategic tools, not checkboxes. Many regions now have Manufacturing and supplier databases (e.g. SC Connex ), minority-, women-, and veteran-owned business registries (e.g. NMSDC - National Minority Supplier Development Council), and government or industry programs to connect large buyers with smaller, specialized suppliers. These are not compliance toys; they’re resilience accelerators.
Step #3: Pilot with purpose, not perfection. You don’t have to switch 80% of your spend overnight. Start with one component, one lane, or one small but strategic share of volume. Measure impact on lead time, quality, responsiveness, and risk. Use data to scale.
Step #4: Build real relationships, not just contracts. Collaborative planning, shared forecasting , and joint problem-solving build trust that shows its value in disruption. When things go sideways, you want suppliers who see themselves as partners, not line items.
Step #5: Make it part of your story. Internally and externally, tell the story that resonates with boards, customers, employees, communities, and increasingly, with regulators and investors too:
• “We improved resilience by building with X new partners.”
• “We reduced risk while supporting local ecosystems.”
• “Our supply chain strategy is a competitive advantage because of who we work with, not just what we buy.”
Bringing Back the Pineapple Moment
So what does the pineapple on the fence look like today for a supply chain or procurement professional? It’s not a fruit on a post or on the corner of your cube (HR would probably have questions). It’s moments like:
• Signing a contract with a new local supplier that closes a critical risk gap.
• Onboarding a partner who helps you innovate a category.
• Seeing your network absorb a disruption with minimal impact because you designed for options, not just cost.
• Savoring the sweetness of measurable community benefits and local economic activity.
The old captains used pineapples to signal: “I made it back. You can trust what I bring.” Today, you have a chance to signal something just as powerful: “We didn’t just optimize for cost. We built a resilient, human supply chain. We chose our partners on purpose.”
And that leads to one simple challenge: Tomorrow, build with someone new. Whether it’s with one new supplier you seriously evaluate, one local partner you invite into a pilot, or one diverse vendor you bring into your RFP, you are the gateway now. You’re the chokepoint where decisions are made about what and who flows through your network.
Use that gateway power. Plant your modern pineapple.
Have questions on how AI is impacting supply chain planning and demand forecasting? Get the answers in this related article.
