Food and beverage distributors face an ever-changing landscape of fashions and fads. You must stay up to date with demand for packaging that looks great on social media to long-term shifts in our food and drink preferences. It’s difficult to know what to prioritize and how to keep pace.
Looking ahead to a sizzling summer, it’s important to have the right tools to keep up with demand. As this summer season’s orders roll in, here are some things to help you prepare.
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Top summer trends
Your customers will already have a good idea of this year’s most popular products. A careful look at changing order patterns will provide valuable information. There are plenty of powerful data analytics tools available to help you create useful market insights. You can then review your suppliers’ production plans, check on your logistics providers and warehouse capacity. You can create marketing campaigns and promotions for products with a short shelf life to get a head of the curve. Make sure your top customers always have the stock they need by setting thresholds for stock levels well in advance.
Featuring quality
As interest in healthy food continues to grow, consumers want more information about the food and beverages they buy. You can help your customers choose the right products by creating useful content with strong quality and sustainability messages. You can even create customer groups to help you share the right information with the right people at the right time. When you regularly provide useful updates based on your expert knowledge you will build your reputation and brand.
Inventory visibility
While catching up with the latest trends is important there are plenty of old favorites in demand this summer. There’s still an important place for childhood staples and even ‘retro’ products like trifle and cherry flavored soft drinks. Your customers will search for all the popular products they need for summer themed meals and events. Accurate inventory visibility makes sure they can find and buy them all quickly and easily. By integrating your enterprise (ERP) system with your business to business (B2B) ecommerce SaaS store, they can see your stock levels online in real time. You can even give lead times and send alerts about new arrivals.
Loyalty programs
Delivering exceptional customer service during one of the busiest seasons of the year helps build customer loyalty. You can increase the lifetime value of customers for your business with an effective loyalty program. Give points for purchases that customers can redeem on later orders. Offer special price breaks according to order volume or value. You can even build demand for premium products by limiting access to your most valued customers.
Simplified reordering
In the busy summer season, many of your customers are out and about. You can simplify reordering with a customer ordering app, so they can replenish their stock on the go. They can access their account details, pay invoices and place orders anywhere, at any time. You can also empower your field sales team with mobile tools to share accurate stock levels and pricing and take orders. When your customers make it back to base, they can quickly update their favorites list for fast reordering. Alternatively, they can use Excel templates to upload or email to save them time.
Optimized shipping
Your customers want to know when their deliveries will arrive and their shipping costs. To maintain high standards of customer service, you can automate online processes to show all the details at checkout. You can connect to third-party logistics providers and include real time shipping information in the purchasing process.
Direct to consumer sales
Your business model might focus on sales to wholesalers and retailers. However, direct to consumer (D2C) sales can bring in valuable extra revenue. With the right warehouse management tools, you can create smaller product bundles suited to consumers. You don’t have to create a separate ecommerce site to meet demand, you can simply offer a guest checkout facility. Your trade customers can still login to see their contract prices and account details and pay their invoices.
These are just a few ideas for you. Find out what else Cloudfy offers to help F&B distributors meet summer’s peak demand. Book a free demonstration today.
