Allison (Alli) Ball led a ‘Skill Nibble’ titled “Getting Your Product on Shelves, The Buyer’s Guide” at the Food Craft Institute on 2017/02/15. She offers $150 / hour private consultations.
Pitching to Wholesale Buyers
- Pricing
- Ordering and Delivery
- Promotional Materials
- Case Count and Minimums
Pricing
Scenarios / questions you need to be prepared to address include:
- Discounts
- Samples
- Shipping
- Promos
- One case free with four cases bought
- Guaranteed sales or buy backs (like consignment – especially for short shelf life items) – Maintain very tight control over inventory and time frame.
For most categories in food retail, buyers target ~40% margin (which is distinct from markup). Ask the buyer for their target margin in your product’s category (with your sell sheet and pricing reflecting your understanding of the category).
Ordering and Delivery
- How do wholesalers order?
- When are deliveries?
- How long to get deliveries?
- Scheduling is especially important for short shelf life items – Better to be consistent and clear with schedule of order and delivery days than to try to respond ad hoc to orders. Order day of Monday is better – that way you’re not trying to fill over the weekend.
- One day to compile orders
- One day to produce
- One day to pack
- One day to deliver
Promotional Materials
A good sell sheet is very important. See canva.com for promotional material creation tools and templates. See Allison Ball’s Sell Sheet Pinterest page for examples. Produce separate pricing sheets from the sell sheet. (Since pricing changes more frequently and may vary by store, it’s better to keep pricing separate from the sell sheet. On the pricing, include validity dates and contact information.) Includes UPC codes (bar codes and the numbers) on both types of sheets.
UPCs may be bought new (from GS1 US, an international non-profit organization) in blocks of 100 or you can buy “recycled” UPCs or resold UPCs. A repurposed UPC can cause a problem if a retailer already has that UPC with another product in their database. (That said, the probability is pretty small that the original owner of the UPC used it for a product, that the product was a food product, and that the information for that food product was still in a database of a retailer also selling the food product with that UPC.) It’s more challenging because you don’t know what the UPC was first used for. [I would think that you could use the first several digits of the UPC to search for the original owner.] You need a separate UPC for each flavor and size of your product. You might even want separate codes for direct and wholesale sales. It’s easier on the buyers (and the producers) if the UPCs for a product line are from the same block of UPCs (and only vary on the last one to four digits).
A ‘shelf talker’ is a tag attached to a retail shelf intended to direct a shopper’s attention to the associated product. The best size is business card size; the maximum size is index card size. Send a retailer a laminated shelf talker along with a pdf. Retailers usually produce their own shelf talkers but they appreciate and will use shelf talkers produced by a supplier if they’re well done. Suppliers sometimes insert ‘rogue’ shelf talkers; they may be quickly noted… or they may stay in place for a month or more.
See www.hubert.com for shelf tag holders and lots of other supplies. (Use the chat [? search?] function to navigate their extensive catalog.)
Case Count and Minimums
Case count is usually 12; should avoid odd (other) case counts. Only do mixed cases if it makes sense from a packing standpoint. A case minimum of two is better than one or more than two. Can vary minimums and the sell sheet details by zone / store / channel – especially if you’re doing the deliveries. “* Ask us for our zone minimums.”
Miscellaneous
Apply constant, gentle pressure without driving the retailer nuts. The amount depends on the buyer; ask the buyer how they prefer to be handled during the introductory stage. Don’t obligate buyers to take action.
Can negotiate with a buyer but you need to have your points predetermined.
Cold calls (in-person) aren’t a good idea. Instead, work through the published buyer contacts. Leave a phone pitch for a designated buyer including brand name, what the product is, … Ask for a 5 minute face-to-face during which you can do a warm handoff of samples, sell sheet, and pricing. Practice the phone pitch. For the samples, a simple gift bag works; don’t get overly fancy. The bag should be evocative of how the product will present on the shelf. As well as a sample of each flavor, include (at least) one example of each size package – though the larger sizes may be empty containers. Most retailers have policies disallowing gifts.
Whole Foods has a published category review schedule. Time your ask to fit within the appropriate schedule.
Some buyers get sales bonuses but that varies by retailer. Safeway and other have “category captain” vendors. Some big vendors pay for shelf space – “pay to play”.
Trader Joe’s is problematic: they are known for doing an initial buy of an innovative product and then dropping it after they can replace with a private label copy.
Week long Retail Ready (for CPG) course; part of a 4-week long online / conference call course. Feb 20th – Mar 17th, 2017; typically three times a year. $897 (- $100 FCI discount).
- Week 1 – business plan
- Week 2 – buyers’ perspectives
- Week 3 – elevator pitch, sell sheets, promotional materials, connecting, pricing
- Week 4 – distribution, brokers, growth strategy