There is a phrase Rusi Kombalov returns to when he talks about transportation and supply chain: “Call your shots.”
As Senior Manager of Transportation with Ocean Spray Cranberries, it means knowing what is going to happen — or at least understanding the variables well enough to make a credible commitment. It means helping your employer gain an edge through supply chain management and transportation, and ensuring your providers deliver on expectations and avoid last-minute surprises.
This sounds straightforward. In today's freight environment, he explains it is anything but. A carrier can commit to a pick-up and delivery. A provider can promise early warning when trouble emerges. Yet when those commitments break down repeatedly, predictability disappears with them. Fuel, regional capacity, modal mix, plant volumes, backhauls and internal planning decisions all become pieces of a constantly shifting puzzle.
For Kombalov, that uncertainty is one of the defining challenges to transportation management. But navigating such uncertainty also is a fitting theme for his career — and his life — that has repeatedly required him to walk into unfamiliar territory, learn quickly and keep moving. His career path has moved him from automated warehouses to manufacturing plants, and from the controls of a forklift to responsibility for sophisticated supply chain and transportation operations.
He simply says: “Change has been part of my entire life.”
Kombalov was born in Burgas, Bulgaria, a city on the Black Sea. At 14, he moved with his family to the United States in search of a better life, and when he first arrived there was one considerable complication: he didn't speak English.
He knew some words, but the Slavic language of Bulgarian was dramatically different from the English language. Attending a high school in America meant learning the curriculum while simultaneously learning how to communicate with the people around him. The personable teenager quickly realized that if he wanted a social life beyond his immediate family, he had little choice but to adapt.
"You'd be surprised what a person can do when you feel like you don't have another choice," he recalls.
He quickly adapted and flourished in his new home country. After graduating from high school, he earned his Bachelor's degree in Supply Chain and Operations Management from University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. That academic choice would open the door to food manufacturing and to on-the-job education that would prove every bit as important.
Kombalov began his supply chain career as an intern with Schreiber Foods, the Wisconsin-based dairy and food manufacturer. When the company offered him a permanent opportunity after completing his college education in 2010, he faced a choice between two entry-level leadership assignments.
One opportunity involved a large but relatively traditional distribution operation that serviced a majority of the customer base in the western United States. The other was at a highly automated, flagship dairy production and distribution complex in Shippensburg, PA. He chose the opportunity in automation because it seemed more exciting and non-traditional in the supply chain field.
While he didn’t fully realize it at the time, this decision would set him on a career journey on a comprehensive career path in distribution and transportation. While the distribution complex had a state-of-the-art Automated Storage and Retrieval System (AS/RS) as part of its operations, Kombalov at the time didn't know much about the fundamentals of warehouse operations that experienced employees take for granted.
So he learned them.
He learned to operate a forklift and how to load trucks. He learned how appointments were scheduled. Eventually, he even learned how to work with programmable logic controllers and troubleshoot errors in the facility's automation. His success led to assignments at other Schreiber facilities in Missouri, Texas and Utah, and eventually to corporate-level responsibility for warehousing and distribution.
This experience established a pattern that would further define his career.
“Get really good at the basics, and the rest comes with time,” he advises. “Before leading an operation, learn how it actually works.”
When COVID-era restructuring brought his time at Schreiber to an end, he joined Ocean Spray, a cooperative owned by more than 700 cranberry farmers in the United States, Canada and Chile. While he could have remained on a corporate logistics trajectory in his career, he deliberately made the choice to move closer to manufacturing.
This is because a mentor had given him advice that stuck: “If you want senior leaders to trust you with critical decisions in a food manufacturing company, you need genuine manufacturing and operational knowledge.”
At Ocean Spray, he became a Regional Supply Chain Manager supporting manufacturing sites in Tomah and Wisconsin Rapids, WI. His teams were responsible for the practical mechanics of keeping food production running: manufacturing schedules, fruit management, movement between bogs, freezers, warehouses and production, packaging procurement and the myriad materials required to keep plants operating.
After roughly two and a half years, another opportunity in transportation materialized.
Despite his broad background in replenishment, planning, sourcing, warehousing, automation, greenfield work, consolidations and cross-border operations, one major supply chain discipline he had not yet experienced was transportation—and he jumped at the opportunity.
"Everything is more expensive, everything is more challenging," Kombalov explains, while customers continue to expect something approaching perfection. He asserts that perfection costs a lot, and sometimes money alone cannot buy it.
That can place transportation leaders in a difficult position, he says. Their job isn't simply to buy capacity at the lowest possible price. They must build networks resilient enough to withstand market swings while still explaining cost and performance to upper management and key stakeholders.
Ocean Spray has leaned into intermodal transportation for planned stock and interplant transfers. Kombalov says approximately 90% of Ocean Spray’s planned freight will move by rail, while customer-facing freight is treated differently because service and transit-time requirements can make additional risk unacceptable.
The distinction reflects a larger philosophy: Optimize aggressively where the operation allows it, but understand where reliability must take precedence.
Carrier selection strategy follows a similar principle. He describes Ocean Spray's established core carriers as "incumbents," or providers that may have worked with the company for five years or longer and continued earning business through successive bid cycles. The company’s philosophy: Longevity matters, and performance matters even more.
"Earn to stay, earn to play" is Kombalov’s philosophy when deciding which providers he’ll work with. He expects his partners to “call your shots and deliver bad news early when things go wrong."
The freight market has tested these relationships, he says. Periods of abundant capacity have allowed shippers to recover some of the extraordinary transportation costs experienced during the pandemic. But market dynamics can reverse quickly. When capacity tightens, a relationship that looked solid in easier conditions can suddenly look very different.
"Ocean Spray's grower-owned structure creates a highly seasonal supply chain where a significant portion of annual inventory must be harvested, processed, stored, and managed within a narrow time window,” he says. “The complexity of balancing agriculture, manufacturing, inventory, and transportation is what makes food supply chains both challenging and rewarding."
Ask Kombalov what advice he would give someone beginning a career in food supply chain management and manufacturing, and his answer is emphatic: "Learn the business from the basics."
For supply chain professionals with ambitions to move into senior leadership, he believes plant experience is especially valuable. Operational credibility builds trust, he suggests. That trust makes it possible to influence change, make decisions more quickly and help solve problems without spending valuable time establishing whether the person offering an opinion truly understands the environment.
"If you have the interest to go into a leadership role within supply chain, go work at a plant first," he advises.
Kombalov's involvement with Food Shippers of America (FSA) began through a colleague who introduced him to the organization. Since then, he has volunteered extensively and taken on a growing role in conference planning and board activities.
But when he talks about FSA, he doesn't begin with titles. He talks about access.
He describes FSA as a tight-knit community where transportation and supply chain professionals are willing to admit they have a problem—and where peers are willing to give ideas, advice and help to solve it.
For example, he takes strategic insights from the annual conference back into the planning process: "I listen to experts in the food industry on the issues that are plaguing me on a day-to-day basis.
Yet, this exchange of perspectives doesn't end when the annual Food Shippers Conference does. He says he uses his industry contacts as sounding boards throughout the year through texts, emails, calls and quick meetings when major transportation issues emerge.
For an executive operating in a market where conditions can change faster than annual plans, those connections and market intelligence can be invaluable.
He says he appreciates the access to people who can be asked such questions as: What are you doing that I haven't thought of? How would you approach this opportunity differently? How would you solve this challenge?"
These are the questions he believes create value.
This philosophy is likely to influence his work on the FSA board as he helps shape programming, content and networking around the real problems facing food shippers.
In many ways, Kombalov’s career has been defined by his willingness to step into the unfamiliar. From arriving in the United States at 14 without speaking English to learning warehouse operations from the seat of a forklift, gaining firsthand experience inside food manufacturing plants and ultimately leading complex transportation operations, he has consistently chosen to “learn by doing.”
Along the way, he has developed a leadership mindset grounded in operational knowledge, accountability and relationships:
For someone whose life and career have required continually adapting to change, perhaps it is fitting that Kombalov now helps other food supply chain leaders navigate uncertainty themselves. The variables may change, the freight markets may shift, and the next challenge may be difficult to predict. For Kombalov, his philosophy remains consistent, whether it is working through shifting markets or other unforeseen challenges: "Know your operation, understand the variables, surround yourself with good people—and when it matters most, be prepared to call your shots."
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