Mobility and Food Distribution Industry
iPhone, iPad, Mobility, Digital Marketing - these are the buzz words in the industry today, right? With the end users having embraced this advancement in technology with both hands, how far the corporations have leveraged this? Has every industry realized the avenues to monetize this new trend? While the answer is Yes, the degree of awareness and adoption varies from industry to industry.
While retailers are ahead on this road, and with CPG companies starting to think seriously, core distributors have not caught up with this trend at all. In this blog, I want to focus on how the food distribution industry is reacting and my take on how they should react.
Before we go any further, we need to understand the profiles of the customers of food distributors. By the sheer nature of their business, food distributors do not directly interact with the end consumers. Their customers are business entities like restaurants, hospitals, etc. So, what we will generally call as B2B will be B2C for them. While some of these customers are large multi-location restaurants, most of them are street customers like the street corner restaurants.
Traditionally, food distributors have relied on touch & feel relationship whereby the sales associates interact with the customers for all their needs. While the main objective of the sales force should be business development, the reality is that they have become the only point of contact for all the customer needs. Be it a simple query like the status of an order or some questions on the invoice, the customer will call the sales person to get his/her question answered. As per one survey, almost 60% of the sales force's bandwidth is being spent on non-sales related activities and that is scary. This is not a scalable model by any stretch of imagination.
Of late, some of the food distributors have realized the opportunity of taking the administrative work away from sales force and either make that into a self-service model or to a back-office call center. The moment the customers are forced to place an order thru the self-service online systems, the question of portability across devices will rise. You can look at mobilizing the customer facing apps from two aspects; first to improve adoption by providing access thru multiple devices so that it becomes easier for chefs to place an order from even the kitchen; second to explore the opportunity to drive business growth or new market share by making it more accessible for the customers and prospective customers.
The second aspect is far more important given the fact that the food distribution industry's market size is somewhat static and the only way to grow for a food distributor is to increase its market share. Ease of access to information and data will provide with that opportunity.
