How to Achieve Sales Growth in Foodservice Distribution – The Horeca Channel

Guest: Stewart Jones, former sales and marketing director for food solutions across the Middle East and South Africa.

Background
Stewart and I worked together at Unilever, co-creating something that revolutionized how the food solutions business worked at the time — we’ve been working together, on and off, for 20-30 years. Stewart specialized in developed and underdeveloped markets, based in South Africa for the last 20 years, mostly in food service.

Fulfilling promises to shareholders
As a sales director on leadership teams, if the business wants 2-3% growth, you have to find a way to deliver it — I don’t like making unfulfilled promises, so I’ve developed techniques and processes to control that growth. “I like surprises, but only for my birthday, not on the sales results.”

Fighting for market share
In the UK and Europe, even 2% growth was hard-fought — every execution had to be excellent, and that’s where real skills were learned. In markets like Africa or the Middle East where growth was easy for years, those skills weren’t developed locally — now you have to fight for every percentage, one share, one store at a time.

What makes food service different from retail
Food service is multi-level and complex — you have to consider your customer, and your customer’s customers. You’re building your customer’s business, not just your own. You provide solutions, not just products; a product is just a means to an end, a tool to make or save them money. The emotion comes in through menus and creativity, but ultimately operators need cost-effective, trustworthy ingredients that provide consistency.

Multi-level, multi-party
There are different layers within an organization — owner, F&B manager, chef, sous chef — and most suppliers sell through a third party (a distributor) rather than direct, since delivery economics for relatively small outlets don’t make sense unless you have a very big range.

Target, monitor, reward
The main way to grow in food service — where you can’t control the number of consumers coming in — is to focus on distribution: new distribution for a new SKU into a target channel, a specific site. You have to monitor what the rep is doing weekly, and align rewards at every level: distributor management, regional manager, rep, and even the customer needs to make a profit from your product.

The rep’s job is to add
“Add” is the word — add one new SKU to an existing outlet, or add one new site. In markets with tens of thousands of independent restaurants, that’s the challenge: picking the right partner and going out to get more outlets.

Monitoring without drowning in data
When we started 20 years ago, there was no data in food service, unlike Nielsen data in retail. Now most distributors have data, but it’s often too complicated — a sales report 25 columns by 8,000 rows is useless. The trick is to keep it simple: which sites, which channels, which SKUs, measured weekly so you can manage forwards, not backward. Measure results (did they add a site?) more than presence time.

Structure follows strategy
Define what you want to be in food service, then let that end goal build your structure and roles. Push and pull: in food service you push stock from a warehouse, but if customers aren’t pulling it out, no one pushes it out the door — so you need different roles for managing accounts/problems versus prospecting for new business.

The cost of low selling time
An example: ten salespeople paid 10,000 AED monthly is 1.2 million AED annually in salaries, but if they’re only spending 20% of their time actually selling, you’re getting a fraction of that investment’s value toward growth.

Choosing the right distributor
Look at infrastructure, capability, current reach, current customers — does that match your range? Does the distributor have a complementary product range? Financial stability is a given, since the distributor is essentially running the bank between you and your customers. Consider whether they have dedicated sales force and time-share of mind for growing, not just servicing deliveries.

Share of mind
The objective is always to get more share of mind than your share of business. This comes through trading terms, incentives, double commission for new sites, communication, and training — distributor reps may be experienced but not trained specifically to sell your product.

What's in it for me (WIIFM)
Money is one motivation, but certifications and working with an organization investing in your growth ranks even higher — people want to learn and grow, not just get paid.

Prioritizing distributors and chains
Logistics, reach, financial status, and portfolio appropriateness for your customer base all matter. We generally work around a joint business plan with a leadership team to agree priorities. Chains are typically an obvious first target since they’re easier to crack with critical mass, though they require a customized solution tied to their brand identity, unlike the branded range that works one-to-many with independents.

Brand reliability vs. consumer emotion
Unlike consumer brands with emotional ties, in food service the brand is about functional reliability and consistency — delivering exactly what’s needed so the operator’s menu and flavor profile aren’t disrupted.

Managing organizational change
You can’t just tell an organization to change overnight — you have to co-create the models with management teams so they own the process, workshop by workshop, region by region or country at a time, then cascade through the organization gradually.

Winning hearts and minds
Where leadership teams take the time to build change from the ground up, it sticks. Where leadership just says “do this with the team,” it becomes a tick-box exercise. You need the right people “on the bus” (from Jim Collins’ Good to Great) — and make sure people see they’ll earn more money by following the new approach, since greed will drive the process for many sales teams.

Empathy in change
You have to relate to people at all levels — their livelihood has been based on how they’ve been doing things, and you’re challenging that. It’s a journey of transformation, sometimes evolution, sometimes revolution, depending on the organization’s stage.

Will AI replace salespeople in food service?
A machine could get down to what a chef needs through good questioning, but the chef would never blossom with a machine — they need to see empathy in your eyes, and they don’t buy without tasting. AI can help with planning, CRM, and data, but chefs buy from people they know and trust.

Maximizing ROI from a sales force
Time is money — allocate time cost-effectively between maintaining relationships and prospecting for new business, using prioritization models customized per business. In one case, a sales force calling on 3,000 outlets for 15-minute courtesy visits was refocused: 40-minute calls, classified customers as platinum/gold/silver, with a contact strategy tied to time allocation, target, monitor, and reward.

Contact strategy beyond frequency
It’s not just about how often, but who is the best person to make contact — telesales, email, WhatsApp automation — a holistic approach bringing sales support and technology together for the buyer’s journey. The chain is as strong as its weakest contact point.

Closing thought
My purpose in life is to share and grow people — I've always wanted to teach, and I'm really looking forward to doing that in this region.

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