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Foodservice as a sales channel is a massive opportunity for food manufacturers.
Consumers spend over $1 trillion in foodservice, much more than they do at grocery stores, and to meet that demand, operators buy ~$400B of supplies each year from food and beverage CPG manufacturers all across the country.
Not only that, consumers also tend to try new things in restaurants. Brands with a foodservice presence are more likely to trial a product via a curated restaurant experience than a crowded retail shelf or, even worse, a billboard.
For over a decade, I directed business strategy at Impossible Foods. During that time, we won over 40k restaurant doors by taking great products and a great pitch directly to operators.
But reaching these operators directly was expensive and time-intensive.
That’s why when I left Impossible, I created First Bite: a data-driven sales platform built specifically for food manufacturers that want to pursue the foodservice market.
Our platform provides deep data on over a million foodservice operators, along with the tools required to automate connecting and selling to these operators. This saves our users time and makes their whole sales process more efficient.
Everything we build is focused on solving the two Big Problems of foodservice sales:
Foodservice commerce flows from manufacturers, through distributors, to operators.
Distributors handle the hard job of moving hundreds of thousands of items from manufacturers to over 1.5M operator locations. But they also share almost zero data with manufacturers on who buys their products, what they buy, and for how much.
This lack of data creates one of the biggest problems for food manufacturers selling to foodservice locations: it prevents them from learning, gathering feedback, and sharing data with the restaurants that are buying their products.
For manufacturers, foodservice then becomes this black box of data that obstructs them from making sound business decisions. Because of this, many food manufacturers tend to focus more on other channels where data is more prevalent and less expensive to acquire.
At Impossible Foods, one of the only times we received transaction-level data between distributors and operators was when I physically followed a shipment of product through New York City and watched it get dropped off at David Chang’s Momofuku restaurant.
Getting relevant data for your food business shouldn’t be that difficult!
And this brings us to our second Big Problem: high transaction costs.
Food manufacturing sales teams often do hundreds of repetitive and unnecessary tasks that keep them from doing what they do best – directly selling to operators. And because of this, they tend to focus on a small segment of high-visibility accounts, as it’s too cumbersome for them to find the best matches for their food products.
A typical salesperson spends half of their time researching chains, researching menus, researching decision makers, entering data into their CRM, and reporting on their activities internally.
And a typical sales and marketing leader makes investments in conferences, marketing programs, broker programs, distributor programs, sampling programs and internal headcount with almost no visibility into which of these investments is driving growth.
The result is expensive and often unknown customer acquisition costs.
Frequently, foodservice sales teams also lose funding to their retail-focused counterparts, because the retail team has better access to data.
Even if the foodservice channel is more profitable, if you can’t measure and optimize winning customer costs, it makes business cases harder to justify.
The consequence of these two Big Problems is a wildly inefficient foodservice marketplace, which leads to:
Our mission at First Bite is to reverse these inefficiencies.
First Bite helps users immediately target, prospect, and grow in foodservice.
The foundation of First Bite is a searchable and segmentable database that contains all the commercial and non-commercial foodservice establishments in the US.
Included in this database is a list of menu items from these operations, and a seamless way to push this data into automated sales and marketing workflows and campaigns.
We’re the first go-to-market software platform that combines tailored sales tools (CRM, forecasting) with deep foodservice market data (covering 1M+ locations) to give food manufacturing sales teams an edge in foodservice.
Here’s what you get with First Bite:
Deep foodservice market data (dozens of data sources)
Sales tools to understand and take action on that data
We’re saving our users hundreds of hours per year in manual research and tracking to supercharge the productivity of sales and marketing teams.
First Bite will continue to build our database and sales platform in order to bring innovative food products to market faster, decrease customer acquisition costs, and bring in more data from operators and food locations.
All of this gives a tremendous advantage to the food manufacturers we serve who are selling to foodservice.
Find out more about what First Bite can do for your food manufacturing business. Take control of the data you’re missing in foodservice, and start winning more accounts.
Schedule a free data consultation, and we’ll help get you started.
