A member on our Membership & Outreach Committee put us in touch with a wholesale sales rep this week who's spent about a decade building a route out of white-tablecloth restaurants and a handful of hotel banquet kitchens — the kind of accounts that order in cases and don't blink at a premium wheel. In March, most of that route closed within about ten days of each other.
"I had a list of around sixty accounts," she told us. "By the end of March I could count on one hand who was still placing orders."
Building a new list from scratch
Rather than wait for restaurants to reopen, she spent April doing something she says she hadn't done since her first year in the job: cold-calling grocery buyers she'd never worked with. Independent grocers, a couple of regional chains, one co-op she'd driven past for years without stopping in. Retail cheese demand held up through the shutdown in a way foodservice didn't, and that gap is exactly where she went looking for a new list.
It wasn't a clean pivot. Grocery buyers order differently than restaurant chefs — smaller individual cuts, tighter margins, a much longer conversation about shelf placement and label design before anyone commits to a first order. She says the learning curve cost her most of April in frustration and a few orders she underpriced just to get a foot in the door. By May the newer accounts were starting to catch up to what she'd lost, and June has been stronger still, as the cheese market itself has tightened up considerably since the spring glut — a sharp reversal from where things stood two months ago. Industry risk reporting circulating this month has also been pushing wholesale buyers toward suppliers who can show a steadier, more diversified customer base, which hasn't hurt her case with a couple of the larger chains.
What she'd tell another member doing the same thing
Her advice isn't complicated, but she says it took her longer than she'd like to admit to believe it: the sales skills transfer, but the relationship doesn't. You can't treat a new grocery buyer like a restaurant chef you've known for a decade, and trying to rush that familiarity backfires. She also admits she undercharged out of anxiety more than once this spring, quoting a nervous discount nobody asked her for, and had to walk a couple of prices back up once she saw what the account was actually worth.
She isn't predicting her restaurant accounts will fully return this year, and she's not waiting around to find out. She's kept every grocery contact from this spring in a separate list from her old restaurant book, on the theory that whichever channel recovers slower, she wants a foothold in the other one already built.
If you're rebuilding a sales territory from scratch the way she did, the Membership & Outreach Committee keeps a running list of members willing to compare notes on channel shifts — reach out if you want an introduction, or if your own pivot looked nothing like this one and you think other members should hear about it.
The International Cheese Federation (ICF) and More Cheese are entirely fictional. This post is demonstration content created for MemberJunction. All people, organizations, events, courses, certifications, figures, and quotations in it are invented, and nothing here represents a real association, a real business, a real person, or real professional advice.