4 Key Strategies for Staying Ahead in the Wholesale Food Industry

As a leader in the wholesale food industry, you know you must focus on solving the unique challenges of the sector to ensure long-term success. The typical pain points, like supply chain disruptions and inefficient processes, would be enough on their own. But there’s even more to consider in the wholesaling space.

For example, business buyers are more deliberate in decision-making than consumers, so you must engender loyalty as a supplier to make sure your customers stick—making it essential to cultivate and maintain robust customer relationships. As such, you must focus on every part of the customer journey, from checking out products to making the sale and providing support, to deliver an exceptional experience.

Moreover, food wholesaling businesses like yours operate on high inventory investments and narrow margins, which means that incremental time savings are all the more important. Streamlined processes for warehousing, inventory management, transportation and order fulfillment are essential for staying on track and maximizing every opportunity.

Each effort requires a proactive mindset, strategic agility and a commitment to innovation to sustain profitability and drive future growth. In this post, we’ll discuss four strategies that can help keep your food wholesale company ahead of the competition and ways that a purpose-built enterprise resource planning (ERP)combined with a transportation management solution can help you implement these changes.

Strategy 1: Diversify Your Product Portfolio To Stay Relevant

As a food wholesaler, whether you're selling to retailers or food service outlets, you must keep your finger on the pulse when it comes to consumer trends. Your customers rely on you—if you don't offer the products they need to satisfy the changing demands of their customers, your competitors sure will. To ensure your product catalogue remains appealing to both new and existing contracts, you'll need to evolve your lines in sync with consumer preferences.

What does that mean in practice? That depends on your business, but can include sourcing gluten-free alternatives, providing plant-based options or catering to health concerns. In short: Your product portfolio should reflect the diverse desires of today's consumers—from everyday staples to seasonal promotions—so your customer's don't need to shop around as trends shift.

Expanding your inventory to meet these evolving demands ensures your relevance in a competitive market and creates opportunities for new revenue streams. A food wholesale ERP solution provides inventory and supply chain management capabilities, making it easier to introduce and track these new product categories. When paired with TMS, it simplifies supplier onboarding, so when you need to source new ingredients or offerings, you can quickly start working with new trade partners.

Strategy 2: Strengthen Trade Partner Relationships for A Competitive Advantage

Building loyalty among trade partners unlocks additional stability and resilience in the volatile food marketplace. By offering personalized service, flexible terms and value-added support, you can create stronger ties with both suppliers and customers. Regular communication and a deep understanding of your partners’ unique needs can set you apart from competitors.

For example, providing individual transport plans to meet your suppliers’ logistical needs or assisting customers in optimizing their stock levels fosters trust and collaboration. Food ERP systems help streamline these interactions by offering comprehensive data on inventory, trends and demand forecasts, allowing you to provide actionable insights to your partners.

Combining ERP with TMS ensures seamless coordination, improving the accuracy of delivery schedules and providing partners with the confidence that you’re a reliable, adaptable ally in their operations. Specifically, route optimization software enables you to make more deliveries on time and in full more often with maximally efficient plans and schedules.

Strategy 3: Optimize Supply Chain Resilience With Technology

We don’t need to tell you that the wholesale food industry involves complex logistics, made more difficult by global supply chain disruptions and fluctuating market demands. Thankfully, the right technology optimizes your supply chain resilience, ensuring you can adapt quickly and maintain operational stability.

An integrated tech stack, including ERP and TMS systems, provides visibility across your supply chain, enabling you to monitor and manage all aspects of sourcing, production and distribution. These tools also allow you to diversify your supplier base to mitigate risks and make data-driven decisions that enhance agility.

For example, during supply chain disruptions, the data visibility provided by an ERP can inform adjustments to procurement plans so you can maintain ideal inventory levels. Meanwhile, real-time route execution functionalities of transportation solutions enable you to flex schedules if unexpected delays arise, and strategic route planning can help you model new strategies to increase agility.

Strategy 4: Boost Operational Efficiency With Automation

The more that your food wholesale company can leverage the latest technology to automate critical processes, the more efficient and consistent your operations will be. Which will, in turn, help boost your profit margins.

The automation features of ERP systems streamline vital processes such as inventory management, warehouse operations and transportation logistics. They also simplify the capture of critical data—like quantities, sources, destinations and expiration dates—and ensure real-time updates with technologies like RFID, handheld barcode and QR code scanners and IoT devices.

What’s more, automated scheduling of compliance and sanitation checks helps prevent contamination and costly recalls. Integrating smart thermometers and sensors with your systems ensures that transportation and storage conditions are consistently monitored. By automating these processes, you’re boosting operational efficiency and setting up your business for long-term success.

Knowing Which Food Wholesale Solutions Are Right for Your Business

Choosing the right food wholesale solutions can be challenging. There are numerous options out there, and ERP and TMS platforms vary in their features and integration capabilities. For sustainable growth, you want to pick solutions that scale with you, are tailored to your specific processes and have advanced integration options.

Just as important is partnering with a vendor that understands the unique challenges of the food and beverage world, with special attention to the most common concerns that wholesale businesses like yours have. At Aptean, we bring decades of experience working with clients in this sector, ensuring that our solutions align with your needs.

What’s more, we offer flexible cloud deployment options for our food and beverage ERP and TMS solutions, so you can save on up-front hardware costs while enjoying airtight cybersecurity, enhanced scalability and broader accessibility.

Finally, take into consideration our recent recognition, the 2024 Top Software & Technology Solutions Award from Food Logistics and Supply & Demand Chain Executive, which is a testament to the quality of our systems and our commitment to customer service.

Ready to learn more about what Aptean’s industry-specific ERP and TMS solutions can do for your food wholesale company? Contact us today, or schedule a personalized demo.