Foodservice Distributors – Everything I have learned in the last 3 years
“Hey Swati, I love your Gluten free onions for our burgers. So what’s your RTM?”
Ever been caught by this question by your favourite restaurant that you have chased two years to get a listing with?
RTM (Route to Market) is the wheels on which your product travels from your manufacturer/warehouse to the kitchen/ office/ hotel/ /restaurant/ vending machine of your foodservice customer.
In simpler terms, RTM are the many local, regional, national and international foodservice distributors who are running the length and breadth of the country delivering to hospitality outlets. These entities specialise in sourcing, warehousing, inventory management, consolidating and delivering a wide array of food and beverage products to foodservice establishments of vastly varying sizes and offerings.
Operating as intermediaries, they facilitate the efficient distribution of goods from manufacturers and producers to end-users, ensuring a steady supply of high-quality products to meet the demands of diverse clientele.
Are foodservice distributors required?
In one word YES.
In more words, here is why:
Imagine you’re Burger King.
So now you’re a network of 500 outlets (owned, franchised or both), with 30 items on your menu.
Each of these 30 items made of 10 different ingredients – some ambient, some fresh, some chilled and others frozen – each with a different shelf life, storage and transport conditions.
Add to this 20 condiments and 10 drinks that you offer your customers on a daily basis.
You then also have about 50 types of table and serve ware to complete the restaurant experience.
This leads to 380 different ingredients (again ambient, fresh, chilled, frozen) and materials that you need in your kitchen everyday for you to fully operate and serve your customers.
380 products PER 500 outlets!
Or 500 outlets with a demand of 380 products that they would require at varying rates, times of the week and volumes to function seamlessly on a day-to-day basis.
And now let’s turn the table and imagine you are the producer of the perfect sauce for Burger King Whopper. The development team loves your sauce, (by some grace of god) procurement agrees with the price and your BRC AA manufacturer can make them in the tens of thousands.
All you need to do is SUPPLY.
BUT who takes your perfect sauce from your manufacturer to those 500 outlets at the rate, days and volumes they want ?
And that, my friends, would be the foodservice distributors.
They deal with an unbelievable amount of unpredictability across lines, rate of sales (ROS), inventory, storage conditions, transport conditions and logistical network to bring your one unique product to that dream customer bridging the gap between producers and end-users all the way from John O’Groats to Land’s End.
