Wholesale Handler
Start with the shops that can say yes on the spot
An independent decides in the building. A chain routes a new line through a category review, a vendor application and a distributor, and none of those happen while you are standing there.
Ask who reviews new lines before you pitch anyone, so the sample does not get left with whoever happened to be on the till. Then go at a time when that person can talk: before 10am or after 2pm for a restaurant, Tuesday to Thursday, and no service period at all.
Take one sample and one page
The page is a sell sheet, and it is one side. A photo, the pack size, the case pack, the wholesale price, the shelf life, the barcode, and two or three sentences of who you are.
Everything past that is a line sheet, which is the same information for the whole range with SKUs, minimums and terms on it, and it is what you send after the visit rather than what you carry into it. In Wholesale Handler each product holds its own SKU and barcode, so those numbers come off the catalogue rather than being kept in a second document that goes stale.
A storefront is the other version of that page: a public listing of the products you choose, at the prices you publish, on a URL you can hand over. It takes no orders and has no enquiry form, so it is a catalogue a buyer can check rather than a way to be found.
Price it so the shop makes its margin
The common shape is keystone: the wholesale price is half the retail price, and the band across categories runs 40 to 60 percent off. Set the retail price you want to see on the shelf, then work back.
Watch the wording when a buyer states a number. Fifty percent margin means half the shelf price, which is a 100 percent markup on your price, and the two get swapped constantly in the same conversation. After costs, a wholesale margin of 20 to 35 percent is the range small food producers are told to hold, with 30 to 35 percent standard in food manufacturing.
Wholesale Handler settles that number before the first order: each customer is on a price list, so the price a shop sees when they order is the one you agreed, and a shop taking a case a week and a restaurant taking a pallet can sit on different lists without a separate catalogue.
Make the first order small enough to be a test
A buyer is deciding whether the product sells in their shop, and the honest way through that is a first order small enough to be worth the risk. Ordinary trade minimums are modest anyway: a 75 dollar floor, or six units a line.
Sale or return is what a shop will ask for, because it moves the whole risk to you. The usual middle is sale or exchange on the first order only, with the stock displayed for two or three months before anything comes back. If you run it, take the unsold off the invoice as a discount line rather than tracking returns separately.
The minimum spend in Wholesale Handler sits on an order profile rather than on the customer, so a starter profile can carry a lower floor and new accounts move onto the standard one when they are established.
A chef is buying your reliability, not your tasting
The tasting gets you the meeting. What decides it is whether you can hold the volume every week, what time you need the order by, and what happens when you are short. Inconsistent supply is what rules small suppliers out, rather than the quality of what they make.
So have the operational answers ready at the pitch: which days you deliver, when ordering closes for each of them, and what the order minimum is. Chefs also check you the way they check everything, which is by asking other chefs in the area, so the first account in a neighbourhood is worth more than its own order value.
The second order is decided by their sell-through
Sell-through is what the shop sold divided by what they bought from you. Over 70 percent is strong, 40 to 70 is healthy, and under 20 percent means the line comes off the shelf. No amount of relationship makes up for a product that sat.
Asking how it is selling is expected rather than pushy, and it is often useful to them: an independent shop rarely notices it is low until reordering in time is already impossible.
The other half of churn is friction you created. Retailers order smaller and later than they used to, so a 40 dollar reorder that costs an email and a two-day wait does not get placed at all. A customer portal where a shop repeats its last order in a minute, at its own prices, is a retention feature rather than an admin one.
When an account does drift it goes quietly - a shortened order, a dropped line, a skipped week. Wholesale Handler measures each customer against their own ordering rhythm rather than a fixed window, and flags the ones now past twice their usual gap.
