Food & Beverage distribution
“The usual, plus two cases.”
Food and drink orders are written the way regulars talk, because they are regulars. The same accounts, the same lines, most weeks — and every one of them still gets typed into the ERP by hand.
What makes this different from quoting.
The order is a habit, not a specification
Half the request refers to what they ordered last time. Resolving “the usual” needs the customer’s history, not a better product search.
Units, cases and pallets are not the same number
A customer orders in the unit that suits them and your ERP wants another. The conversion is where quiet, expensive mistakes get made.
Price is agreed, and it moves
Per-customer agreements, seasonal promotions, volume breaks. The right price for this account this week is rarely the number on the list.
Volume is the whole problem
Individually these orders are trivial. It is the hundreds of them a week, each needing two minutes of retyping, that consumes a back office.
Where this is proven.
In lighting, not here. Our live client is a multi-brand lighting distributor, and order entry and quoting share the same read-match-draft path — but the F&B habits above are ones we have studied rather than served. One funded competitor has chosen this vertical and it matches our own view of where the shape fits; that is market signal, not a track record.
No client in this sector yet. Lighting is where it runs today.
Questions from food and drink distributors.
Have you done this for a food distributor?
No. Our production client is in lighting. Order entry is a real, shipped part of the product, but we have not run it against a food and drink catalog, and we would rather say so now than discover it together later.
Can it resolve “the same as last time”?
That is exactly the case that needs care. Where the history makes it unambiguous it can propose the lines; where it does not, the line is marked More details needed rather than guessed. Nobody wants a pallet of the wrong vintage because the software was confident.
What about orders that arrive by WhatsApp?
Ettore works on written requests and their attachments. Whether a given messaging channel can be connected depends on what it exposes — worth a specific conversation rather than a general yes.
Our stock moves daily. Will it quote something we do not have?
Availability is read at the moment the draft is built, and a person approves before anything goes out. The draft is a starting point for that check, not a commitment made on your behalf.
Send us a week of orders.
Real ones, with the shorthand and the standing lines. That is the only honest way to find out whether this fits your book.