Wholesale Handler
Every time wholesale fruit and veg prices move, someone has to tell every customer. By phone, text, WhatsApp, email - whatever it takes to reach every restaurant, café, and shop before orders come in. The more customers, the longer it takes. And fresh produce prices move a lot - market conditions, seasonal supply, weather disruptions can shift what you're paying at the wholesaler overnight.
Why the common workarounds don't work
WhatsApp broadcast or group message. Quick to send, but prices get buried in the chat. There's no way to know who actually read it. And when a customer scrolls back to find Tuesday's prices on Thursday, they might grab the wrong list.
Emailing a PDF price list. Better than WhatsApp, but someone still has to manually create and send it every time prices move. Customers save the PDF and order from a stale copy two weeks later. The mismatch only surfaces when the invoice doesn't match what they expected.
Telling them on delivery. Too late. The order was already placed at the old price. That turns a delivery into a pricing conversation on a kitchen doorstep at 5am while the chef is prepping.
All three approaches have the same underlying problem: they rely on someone to remember which prices changed, when they changed, and to manually push that information out to every customer. That's a bookkeeping task, not a thinking task. A box of peppers goes up, a case of strawberries comes down, avocado prices swing midweek - prices get missed, the wrong list goes to the wrong customer, someone doesn't get updated. Not because anyone is careless - because tracking dozens of fruit and veg prices across dozens of trade customers is exactly the kind of work a computer handles trivially and a human handles badly.
Put prices where customers order
The answer is simpler than it sounds: if customers see the current price at the moment they place their order, you never need to notify anyone. You update the price once and it's live. The price change is the notification.
This is what an online ordering portal does. Restaurants, cafés, grocers, and caterers log in, see your current product list with current prices, and order from that. When you change a price, every customer sees the updated price next time they open the portal. No phone calls, no broadcasts, no stale PDFs.
How this works with Wholesale Handler
Open the product in Wholesale Handler, type the new price, save. It takes about 10 seconds. The system tracks that the price changed and shows customers a visible indicator: the new price, what it was before, and when it changed. Customers know immediately that something moved, without anyone having to tell them.
If tomatoes, peppers, and courgettes all change price on the same morning, updating three products takes under a minute. Every customer ordering that day - whether it's a restaurant chain or a corner shop - sees the correct prices. The computer keeps track of what changed and when - you don't have to.
What about customers who want advance notice?
Some customers - particularly restaurants running tight margins - want to know about big price jumps before they order. That's fair. A quick message to a few key accounts when something significant moves is still reasonable.
The difference is that it becomes the exception rather than the rule. One message to a few people about a big change, not a broadcast to everyone about every change. The routine updates happen automatically through the portal. You only pick up the phone when it actually matters.
