Wholesale Handler
Getting the sample tasted
A scheduled drop-off outperforms an unannounced one. For a restaurant, mid-morning is the window, roughly 10am to noon, after the deliveries and before prep gets serious. For an independent shop, late morning or early afternoon, when the till is quiet. A kitchen in service has nothing to give you.
Label the sample with the product name, the weight and your contact details, and put one insert in the bag: price per unit, pack size, minimum order, the days you deliver and how an order gets placed. Chefs are pitched in words constantly and decide in mouthfuls, so the paper only has to make acting on the tasting possible.
Follow up three to five business days after a restaurant drop, and one to two weeks after a shop. Two follow-ups with no reply is an answer.
A cold approach has to cost the buyer two minutes
Chefs generally prefer email or a text message to a phone call. A call that has to happen goes between 10am and noon and stays under two minutes. For an independent shop, phone and ask who buys - usually the owner, or the produce or category manager - and ask for a meeting rather than turning up with a box.
What gets left behind is one page: product photo, pack size and case configuration, wholesale price, shelf life, barcode, two or three sentences of story, and the ordering contact. How to approach shops and restaurants to stock your product covers the pitch itself in detail.
Compliant labelling, a barcode, a tested shelf life, food safety documentation and liability insurance are what a buyer asks for after saying yes, and missing one turns the yes back into a maybe.
The price has to leave the buyer their margin
Grocers look for a 30 to 40 percent margin on local lines, so the wholesale price is worked backwards from the shelf price rather than forwards from cost. On restaurant accounts wholesale typically sits at 50 to 70 percent of retail, minimum orders of $75 to $150 are common, and net 30 is the usual term.
Different accounts land on different numbers once there are more than a handful of them, which is what a price list exists to hold. What is a wholesale price list covers the shape of one.
A trade show sells reach at a published rate
Booth space at the Summer Fancy Food Show in June 2026 was $49 a square foot for Specialty Food Association members, putting a 5x10 stand at $2,450 and a 10x10 at $4,900, with a $750 upcharge for a corner. The next show is 25 to 27 July 2027 at the Javits Center in New York, and state pavilions take the same rate while sharing the surrounding costs.
Floor space is the smallest line on that invoice. Build, freight, drayage, travel and staffing take a modest first stand to an estimated $15,000 all in, and the leads are worth nothing until the sample, the price list and the follow-up land in the two weeks afterwards.
A market stall is a lead source as well as a sales channel
Buyers shop. A stall puts the product in front of chefs and shop owners who came for their own lunch, with no appointment and no gatekeeper, and it settles which lines are worth taking to a buyer at all: the market shows what sells and at what price before a case is ever delivered wholesale. Keep sell sheets under the counter, since that conversation happens once.
Distributors and marketplaces trade margin for discovery
A distributor buys at a discount off wholesale, commonly 20 to 30 percent in natural and specialty categories, and then adds a stack of charges on top: slotting and new-item fees, free fills, data fees, spoilage allowances, promotional programmes, freight markups and compliance deductions for routing, labelling or paperwork that missed a standard. One founder published the arithmetic: $32,000 invoiced to a national distributor, $21,000 received, with 34 percent absorbed by chargebacks, fees and returns.
A distributor is also a gatekeeper rather than a sales force. Retailers instruct their distributor to stock a line, so the listing follows the relationship you built rather than replacing it. Regional distributors are the usual first step.
Marketplaces charge differently. On Faire, a US brand pays 15 percent commission on marketplace orders plus a one-off $10 fee the first time a given retailer orders. A brand outside North America pays a 10 percent referral fee on top of that first order, so 25 percent on it, then 15 percent on every reorder. Retailers the brand brings in through its own Faire Direct link are commission-free. Some sources quote 25 percent as the general new-customer rate; per Faire's own help centre that figure applies to brands outside North America, and a US brand quoting it will misprice.
Both are priced on reorders, which is the argument for using a discovery channel to find buyers and then moving the repeat business onto your own terms. Selling wholesale direct alongside Faire covers running both at once, and which accounts the commission still applies to when you do.
Referrals come out of accounts that are already happy
Buyers talk to buyers. Shops on the same street and chefs who trained in the same kitchen compare notes on who is reliable, and a producer already delivering on time to one of them is a low-risk recommendation. The moment to ask is just after a reorder, when the account has demonstrated its own answer.
A buyer who has to text you to order eventually texts someone easier
Accounts are rarely lost on the product. They are lost on the order that had to be chased, the price that changed without warning, the delivery that arrived a day after the menu needed it, and the invoice that turned up wrong.
That is the half software touches. A portal the buyer signs into moves ordering to 11pm on a Sunday instead of into your messages, standing orders cover the accounts taking the same thing every week, a per-customer price list shows each buyer their own rate with any recent change struck through beside it, a cutoff closes the Friday run on Thursday without a conversation, and invoices and packing slips come out of the orders rather than being typed again. One producer supplying 41 store locations put the saving at almost seven hours a week.
Accounts go quiet before they leave, and a buyer who has not ordered in two or three weeks is worth a short message about what is coming into season. Wholesale Handler flags those on the dashboard, and costs a flat monthly fee with no per-order fee and no commission on order value. Wholesale customer portal covers what the buyer sees.
