Part-Time

Lead Event Specialist

Acosta Group

Acosta Group

1-10 employees

Retail, marketing, and foodservice solutions provider

Compensation Overview

$13.50/hr

Greensboro, NC, USA

In Person

Limited travel; on-site in Greensboro, North Carolina.

Bachelor's

Category
Retail (1)

Get referred to Acosta Group

See people who can refer or advise you

Requirements
  • Education/Experience: High school diploma or general education degree (GED); or one to three months’ related experience and/or training; or equivalent combination of education and experience.
  • Computer Skills: Proficient ability to use and navigate on a personal computer and personal mobile device using applications and internal systems.
  • Certificates, Licenses, Registrations: Food Safety Professional Certification, Local Food handlers permit if required.
  • Physical Demands: The employee will be regularly required to stand; walk; use hands and fingers to handle or feel; reach with hands and arms (including reaching overhead); talk and hear; visual ability to read instructions and perform responsibilities; stoop; kneel; crouch; climb (including use of a 6’ ladder); balance; lift and carry up to 25 pounds (including occasional lifting of up to 50 pounds); push and pull a wheeled demonstration cart fully laden with appliances, supplies and product; prepare foods using raw products (e.g., meats, poultry), using cooking utensils such as knives, convection oven, coffee maker, electric fryer, microwaves; be in contact with cleaning supplies.
  • Language Skills: English is the primary language skill; however, bilingual skills may be required based on business necessity.
  • Physical Appearance: The associate must present a neat, clean, and appropriately groomed appearance. Specific Retailer Dress code requirements are included in the training documents.
  • Working Conditions: Retail store environment with limited travel.
Responsibilities
  • Management and maintenance of the equipment and supplies used for events to ensure they are clean and secured in the agreed upon area of the backroom.
  • When Supervisor is absent, communicate with store management about the upcoming events and the execution of past events in their store.
  • When Supervisor is absent, be the point person for all events being conducted in the store. Assists other Event Specialists with event kits, materials and tools as needed.
  • Assist Supervisor by always providing leadership and knowledge to the team.
  • Possesses the aptitude and ability to gain adequate knowledge of the products represented.
  • Has desire and ability to proactively intercept, engage, interact, and sell product to the consumer in a positive manner.
  • Able to assist/perform all job responsibilities assigned to the demo program.
  • Can effectively communicate the features and benefits of the product.
  • Ability to prepare and serve food samples including raw meats, produce and eggs complying with food safety guidelines.
  • Ability to prepare and serve food samples using small appliances such as microwaves, fryers, skillets, coffee makers and knives.
  • Can maintain a clean, sterile and safe workstation using cleaning chemicals.
  • Maintains a professional appearance consistent with the requirements of the job.
  • Properly sets up and prepares Event Table for execution.
  • Completes all work assigned.
  • Assists with preparation for client visits and completes audit corrections.
  • Builds and maintains rapport with store personnel to effectively meet company and client objectives.
  • Completes expense reports as per Company Policy.
  • Prepares and submits all on-line requirements on the same day as Event execution.
  • Takes digital photos of Perfect Table Setup to document success stories for clients.
  • Responsibilities With Regard to Workers’ Compensation Claims: You are responsible for reporting all employment related injuries you incur to your direct supervisor as soon as possible following an incident resulting in an injury.

Acosta Group coordinates a network of trusted retail, marketing, and foodservice agencies to help brands grow wherever they are sold. It provides end-to-end support across the consumer journey, including in-store sales execution, training, omnichannel marketing, and data-driven insights. Unlike a single firm, it operates as a collective of specialized agencies under one umbrella, enabling cohesive, cross-channel programs and shared data. Its goal is to accelerate brand growth by connecting today’s commerce activities with tomorrow’s opportunities.

Company Size

1-10

Company Stage

N/A

Total Funding

N/A

Headquarters

Jacksonville, Florida

Founded

2023

Get referred to Acosta Group

See people who can refer or advise you

Simplify Jobs

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

  • July 2026 Mueller hire deepens retailer access during supplier-retailer reset.
  • June 2026 fresh study strengthens brand and private-label advisory revenues.
  • Acosta's 2026 consumer predictions center AI companions, personalization, and holistic value.

What critics are saying

  • Jan. 2026 ERISA suit targets Acosta's $14 million forfeiture allocation and $4.7 million expenses.
  • CommerceIQ, Amazon, and Walmart compress agency margins by automating retail media workflows.
  • Retailers and brands bypass Acosta entirely if AI tools replace intermediary sales agencies.

What makes Acosta Group unique

  • Jan. 2026 CommerceIQ alliance made Acosta one of retail's first AI-driven agencies.
  • July 14, 2026 Joe Mueller added Kellanova-era retailer relationships to omnichannel sales.
  • June 2026 fresh research with 2,226 shoppers and 40,000-member community guides category strategy.

Help us improve and share your feedback! Did you find this helpful?

Benefits

Health Insurance

Dental Insurance

Vision Insurance

Health Savings Account/Flexible Spending Account

Life Insurance

401(k) Company Match

Legal Insurance

Employee Discount Program

Tuition Reimbursement

Performance Bonus

Professional Development Budget

Company News

Mass Market Retailers
Jul 14th, 2026
Acosta Group names Joe Mueller Chief Retailer Partnerships Officer.

Acosta Group names Joe Mueller Chief Retailer Partnerships Officer. Former Kellanova executive brings more than 35 years of experience building strategic partnerships across the retail industry. July 14, 2026. 4:05 PM JACKSONVILLE, Fla. - Acosta Group has announced that Joe Mueller, one of the retail industry's most respected customer development leaders, is joining the company as Chief Retailer Partnerships Officer, a newly created role focused on strengthening retailer relationships and advancing collaboration across the retail ecosystem. In this role, Mueller will partner closely with agency leadership teams across Acosta Group's Omnichannel Sales & Services organization, helping strengthen retailer relationships, identify growth opportunities for clients and customers, and provide retail marketplace insights that help shape strategies and solutions across the business. "Strong retailer relationships are fundamental to helping our clients grow," said Mark Rahiya, Group President, Omnichannel Sales & Services, Acosta Group. "This role reflects our continued investment in the retailer relationships and strategic partnerships that drive growth across the retail ecosystem. Joe has earned tremendous respect across the retail industry throughout his career. His relationships and marketplace insight will help us strengthen collaboration with retailers, identify new opportunities for growth and deliver even greater results for our clients and customers." Mueller joins Acosta Group following a distinguished 35-year career with Kellanova and Kellogg Company, where he most recently served as Vice President, Industry and Customer Development. Throughout his career, he led some of the company's largest customer businesses, built retailer partnerships at scale and developed commercial strategies that drove growth across multiple channels. He also worked closely with Acosta Group throughout his career on retail execution, customer development and growth initiatives. Joe's experience complements Acosta Group's long-standing focus on helping brands and retailers grow together. By combining deep retailer relationships with marketplace expertise and execution capabilities, Acosta Group continues to help clients and customers identify opportunities, strengthen collaboration and create greater value for shoppers.

PR Newswire
Jul 14th, 2026
Acosta Group appoints Joe Mueller as Chief Retailer Partnerships Officer

Acosta Group has appointed Joe Mueller as Chief Retailer Partnerships Officer, a newly created position focused on strengthening retailer relationships and advancing collaboration across the retail ecosystem. Mueller brings over 35 years of experience from Kellanova and Kellogg Company, where he most recently served as Vice President, Industry and Customer Development. In his new role, Mueller will work with agency leadership teams across Acosta Group's Omnichannel Sales & Services organisation to strengthen retailer relationships, identify growth opportunities, and provide retail marketplace insights. "Strong retailer relationships are fundamental to helping our clients grow," said Mark Rahiya, Group President, Omnichannel Sales & Services at Acosta Group. Mueller's appointment reflects the company's continued investment in strategic partnerships that drive growth across the retail ecosystem.

The Shelby Report
Jun 9th, 2026
Acosta Group: national brands, Private Label lift fresh together.

Acosta Group: national brands, Private Label lift fresh together. Share via: ORLANDO, Fla. - Freshness gets a product considered, but the brand often gets it chosen. That was the central message from Acosta Group during a June 8 session at the IDDBA Show at the Orange County Convention Center, where two company leaders unpacked new research on how shoppers weigh national brands against private label across the fresh perimeter. In "Rising Together: How Brand and Private Label Synergy Drive Growth in Fresh Prepared Foods," Kathy Risch, senior vice president of thought leadership and shopper insights, and John DuBois, vice president of fresh foods, U.S., argued that the question facing retailers is not national brand versus private label. It is how to use both, because, as DuBois put it more than once during the presentation, "all tides rise together." Inside the research. The findings come from Acosta Group's "Fresh Insights: Why Brand in Fresh Requires a Different Lens" study, conducted in March 2026 among 2,226 U.S. shoppers ages 18 to 79 who had purchased fresh bread, shredded cheese, refrigerated salsa or refrigerated pasta within the prior three months. Roughly 250 shoppers evaluated each product concept. Respondents were drawn from the company's proprietary Shopper Community of more than 40,000 demographically diverse U.S. household shoppers. Risch said the team deliberately went narrow rather than wide, concentrating on four highly shopped dairy, deli and bakery categories so it could measure how brand behaves when shoppers face real trade-offs. Freshness and price lead, but brand shapes the choice. When shoppers were asked what matters most in fresh, freshness or quality ranked first at 69 percent, followed by price at 66 percent and brands at 52 percent. Those fundamentals set the baseline, Risch said, but brand becomes a more powerful factor the moment shoppers are forced to choose between comparable options, especially in categories where quality is harder to judge by sight. The pull of national brands showed up clearly in forced-choice testing. Across the four categories, shoppers preferred national brand concepts 61 percent of the time over store brand concepts. National brands also carried a 17 percent higher "fair price" perception overall, with shoppers pegging a fair price at $5.90 for national brand concepts versus $5.03 for store brands. Risch also noted that shoppers want national brands present in the perimeter. In the research, 82 percent said it is important that the fresh area of the store include well-known, nationally advertised brands, a signal that assortment, not just price, drives how shoppers judge the section. The impact of brand was far from uniform. Refrigerated pasta emerged as one of the most brand-influenced categories, with national brands outperforming on appeal, trust and preference. Cheese showed the widest price gap, with shoppers expecting roughly a 32 percent higher price for the national brand. Salsa told a different story: shoppers rated store and national brands similarly on quality and appeal, yet still reached for the national brand more often at the final moment of decision. Generation mattered, too. Millennials and Gen Z showed the greatest willingness to pay a premium for national brands in fresh. Gen Z assigned national brands a 21 percent higher fair price than store brands, the largest gap of any generation studied. Acosta Group's segmentation found that national brand seekers made up the largest group at 44 percent of fresh shoppers, followed by occasion-driven explorers at 30 percent and private label loyalists at 22 percent, alongside a convenience-first practical segment. One of the study's most striking findings, Risch said, was that even private label loyalists assigned national brands a higher fair price for certain fresh occasions, underscoring the difference between an everyday default purchase and a higher-confidence occasion buy. A halo effect across the department. The research also pointed to a halo effect when the two brand types sit side by side. Most shoppers said that seeing a familiar national brand alongside a store brand made the section feel more trustworthy, rather than diminishing the store brand. In the concept testing, the national brands shown included names such as La Brea Bakery in artisan bread, BelGioioso in cheese, Buitoni and Rana in refrigerated pasta, and Sabra in dips and salsa, each paired against a generic store brand equivalent. DuBois said national brands expand reach and bring new shoppers into a category, while behaving like higher-value buyers once they choose, purchasing more frequently and at higher units per trip. Store brands, he said, remain essential anchors for everyday value, margin efficiency and loyalty among price-focused shoppers. All tides rise together. In an announcement accompanying the research, Mark Rahiya, group president of omnichannel sales and services, said the strongest fresh strategies leverage both brand types. Store brands anchor value and everyday loyalty, he said, while national brands expand category reach, strengthen trust and attract incremental, higher-value shoppers. DuBois closed on the same note, telling the audience the takeaway is not that one brand type is better than the other. "Ultimately, all tides rise together," he said.

MarTech Vibe
Jan 21st, 2026
Acosta Group Announces Strategic Alliance with CommerceIQ

Acosta Group announces strategic alliance with CommerceIQ. As part of the new partnership, client-focused CommerceIQ experts are joining the Acosta Group Connected Commerce team to accelerate the adoption and use of the CommerceIQ platform. Acosta Group's Connected Commerce team and CommerceIQ have joined forces, harnessing the distinct strengths of both organisations to drive measurable growth opportunities for brands. The alliance establishes Acosta Group Connected Commerce as one of the industry's first AI-driven agency teams. "This partnership enables us to strategically leverage CommerceIQ's advanced technology and AI-driven capabilities with our own omnichannel expertise, resulting in an ability to act faster, think bigger, and deliver stronger results for our clients - critical in today's fast-moving marketplace," said John Carroll, President, Connected Commerce for Acosta Group. Acosta Group works at the intersection of brands and retailers, partnering with over 3,200 clients, including more than 130 billion-dollar brands, as well as retailers across grocery, CPG, and consumer electronics. Its Connected Commerce team provides omnichannel account management, digital shelf management, retail media, full-service Amazon, and shopper marketing services. CommerceIQ is the retail AI platform used by brands to optimise media investments, improve share of search, and drive incremental sales growth. The CommerceIQ platform features AI teammates that continuously analyse hundreds of digital signals to build reports, run optimisations, and deliver real-time recommendations that outperform traditional rules-based automation systems. With a global retail network of over 1,450 partners and a customer base exceeding 2,200 brands, CommerceIQ's platform is trusted to turn data into decisions at scale. In today's connected commerce landscape, brands face an overwhelming pace - making dozens of decisions per minute. This unified technology platform integrates sales, media, and content into a single, actionable system, turning fragmented insights into coordinated dashboards and workflows. "We are gaining a measurable technological edge," said Carroll, "accelerating data stitching and unlocking more time for strategic initiatives, joint business planning, creative problem-solving, and direct customer engagement." Rohan Ganeson, President, CommerceIQ, added, "This strategic alliance will deliver transformative solutions for our shared clients. Moving forward, we will continue to double down on our platform investments, accelerating innovation and delivering best-in-class solutions, with a key focus on advancing agentic AI to unlock new efficiencies across commerce operations." "The additive agency capabilities of Acosta Group provide a powerful advantage to our clients today and looking into the future." As part of the new partnership, client-focused CommerceIQ experts are joining the Acosta Group Connected Commerce team to accelerate the adoption and use of the CommerceIQ platform. "These new associates further strengthen our ability to deliver the most advanced and innovative end-to-end managed services solutions," said Carroll. Carroll and Ganeson emphasised the close alignment between their shared culture of innovation and client-first focus, supporting a seamless transition for both clients and associates and reinforcing shared values and operational continuity. "With this partnership, we are building agency solutions that clients are beginning to seek out now, but will find essential in the immediate future," said Carroll. The Martechvibe team works with a staff of in-house writers and industry experts. View More

PR Newswire
May 20th, 2025
Bio-Cat Gains Organic Certification To Meet The Growing Demands Of Consumers

TROY, Va. and SHAKOPEE, Minn., May 20, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- As consumer demand for clean-label, organic, and non-GMO products continues to surge, the pressure is mounting on ingredient suppliers to meet stringent certification standards and scale production accordingly.As the "food as medicine" movement gains traction and shoppers report increasing their purchases of natural (23%) and organic (22%) products over the last six months, the message is clear: the future of food is clean, and suppliers must rise to the occasion—or risk being left behind*