The Biggest Food Service Mistake Brands Make

I hope everyone is past their post-Expo West hangover! 

It was a great show (minus the rain) and it’s always amazing to see all our brand partners and industry friends. 

There are enough Expo West trend articles to fill North Hall, so today I wanted to go in a slightly different direction for this week’s issue…

Today, I want to talk about food service. Primarily I want to focus on the main thing I see brands get wrong when it comes to their food service strategy and the alarm bells that go off in my head when I hear from a brand who has yet to see success in retail and therefore they are pivoting to food service. 

Blending a detailed food service (also known as on-premise) sales strategy with your retail plan can be the ultimate unlock for your brand, but too many brands grasp at food service as a life preserver instead of a key part of their go-to-market strategy from day one. 

When done right, food service can be more than just another sales vertical for your brand, it can be the driving force behind your brand's loyalty and education efforts. This is what we are going to go through today. 

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In 2023 I talked about the importance of secondary placement which also highlighted the potential of food service sales for brands. 

My previous employer Fine & Raw did a relatively good job aligning their food service sales with their retail strategy, but it was already established as part of their identity and growth plan before I got there. This, paired with an amazing product and healthy margins, gave the company a ton of flexibility as they grew. 

During the time that I was there, I saw that the two main outputs from our food service efforts (outside of revenue) were education and brand loyalty. 

By finding aligned partners we were able to not only educate our potential customers on the product and introduce it to them in a creative way that established brand loyalty, we were able to train and educate an entire new team, the food service staff, on why our chocolate was the best which then was passed to the consumer. 

We did collaborative bars with local restaurants, made chocolate syrup for branded hot chocolate, and developed bulk baking chocolate that was used and called out on dessert menus across New York City. 

This Ralph Lauren collaboration wasn’t only one of our bigger orders each year, but gave us a chance to attach ourselves to an international brand where consumers would try our chocolate bars at a Ralph’s Coffee shop and then continue to support our branded bars through our distribution in Whole Foods and other similar accounts.

Everything we did was done to introduce more people to the brand so that our retail sales would increase and brand loyalty along with it. Our long tail approach allowed us to be fun and creative with a multitude of partners and then fill out our retail distribution around those food service partners, understanding one would serve the other. 

This is how I wish more brands would view food service. Food service is not an easier sale and it isn’t an escape route if your brand is struggling in retail. The two strategies should work in unison, but food service should always be positioned in support of your retail business. 

I can’t tell you how many brand conversations I have had where food service is seen as a pivot away from retail and in my humble opinion that is one of the biggest signals that a brand is on a downward trajectory. These two strategies must coincide to truly unlock the potential for the brand and be a part of your internal lexicon from day one. 

A brand that I admire deeply is Counter Culture Coffee. If I go into my closest three independently owned coffee stores, they all use Counter Culture. 

Not only do they only use Counter Culture, they also have the product merchandised behind the counter to buy, a sign that says they are brewing with Counter Culture, and most importantly they have a barista who is passionate about coffee using their product and acting as a brand advocate. 

As a consumer, that experience imprints on me. If I love my Café au lait at my local coffee shop and I understand the craft and care that they take in picking the beans they use, then the next time I find myself in the coffee aisle at my local store, it’s going to be an easy decision which bag I reach for. 

Counter Culture is available in my local Whole Foods, ShopRite, and independent grocers - all very different retailers, but all supported by nearby coffee shops who serve Counter Culture. 

Counter Culture doesn’t just view their wholesale business as revenue, but as the tip of the spear for their consumer education, because each café that uses the product has been trained on it and is now acting as a brand champion in the highly intimate setting that is your local coffee shop. 

The brand does an amazing job training local baristas and even local consumers through their training centers, and in my mind the program is one of the best brand building tools I have seen not only for their food service business, but as a trade spend effort to support their retailers. 

It takes years to see the results come to fruition on activations like this, but you can see and feel the intention behind it. 

Food service is an entirely different sales process and skill set than retail sales, but the education and brand loyalty that it can provide long term can be game changing for your retail business.

I challenge more brands to think creatively about how they can approach food service in a way that aligns with their long term brand goals and not just another vertical to chase needed top line revenue. 

Please let me know if you have any food service activations that you want to call out, I would love to hear about them. Thanks so much for reading and we’ll see you next week!