Ian Leaman’s Post

I'll be speaking on a panel at Fancy Food about how AI is changing the food industry. Come see us Sunday at 3 p.m. on the main stage. If you miss the talk, I'll be walking the show Sun/Mon/Tue. Come say hi! Thanks, Michael Wolf and Specialty Food Association, for organizing. https://lnkd.in/eXsAjF6Q

Why do distributors, brands, and suppliers have such big inside sales and customer experience teams? Wholesale is a relationship-driven business, but when you investigate what these teams are doing… you find that they are doing data entry, not delighting customers. * Time is spent by the team decoding vague descriptions provided by the customer or partial item numbers. * Up until recently, this or expensive and clunky automation, like EDI, has been the only solution, but AI is already changing that. Advances in AI can comprehend and interpret human nuances. Imagine a system that can understand 1. What the customer wants to order 2. Any revisions that need to happen to meet MOQ and ensure profitability, 3. Suggest additional purchases 4. And all of this automatically gets into the system for fulfillment with no data entry. Unintuitively, AI will make the supply chain more relationship-driven. If you want to find out how we’re already doing it, DM me!

We don't build trade promotion software, but at Pantry we see many different TPM implementations. I'm a fan of any tool that saves people time. DM me if you'd like an unbiased perspective.

We’ve known this for a while, but I see so many brands going omnichannel. It doesn’t work to be purely e-commerce. Why? IOS14.5 updates made it difficult to track and advertise to the “right” customer Google is entirely phasing out tracking cookies by Q3 2024 And CAC has been going through the roof So what does this mean? Brands - specifically food & bev- are looking to embrace retail sooner because the unit economics of D2C no longer make sense with insane CACS + significant shipping costs. You can build a big business omnichannel, too. For example, ▶️Graza launched in Jan 2022, a few months later in April ‘22 they launched in retail and in June ‘22 they launched in 116 Whole Foods stores. Today Graza is in over 7,000 stores. ▶️Liquid Death is one of the most talked about bev brands with its recent $1.4B valuation. That valuation didn’t just come from D2C. Liquid Death is sold all over - big + small retailers and even bars. ▶️@DrinkLunar launched in 2021 and they started by selling to restaurants and are now sold at Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, H-Mart, and more!

Getting into wholesale is a huge accomplishment that every brand should celebrate, but here’s the truth: Transitioning into wholesale can feel like gearing up a cannon - it requires tons of strategic planning to ensure you’re aiming in the right direction. Layer in the complexities of lead times (2-month buffers at each step), distributor operations, forecasting + introducing a new product to the shelves, and it can quickly feel like you’re shooting in the dark. So why even bother with wholesale in the first place? → It’s a major growth opportunity - one big wholesale customer can be millions of dollars in revenue every year. → Every brand needs to be omnichannel – with IOS14.5 updates & rising CACs, brands need to think about multiple sales channels and wholesale is a major one! → Wholesale can make unit economics work – the cost of shipping makes it very difficult for heavy food items and beverage brands to be cost-efficient through D2C. If you’ve been selling wholesale or getting ready for your first big account, let me know. I have some resources that can help!

I see so many incredibly talented people in CPG wasting time on manual tasks. These things aren’t strategic but necessary for the business to grow. ✅ Double, or even triple, entering data between legacy systems ✅ Emailing back and forth with a distributor, warehouse, or carrier to fulfill an order. ✅ Filling out forms (opening new distributors, new product launches, retailers, etc) ✅ So…many… internal email threads about exceptions, MOQs, and other order validation rules. With Pantry AI, our goal is to automate all the BS so people can focus on relationships and strategy.

When I first started Pantry.AI, I didn’t understand the way wholesale operated. It’s an old-school industry that runs on pen, paper, and personal relationships. This means navigating complex relationships, tons of manual data-entry, and an overall lack of transparency that can leave you wondering: is my product actually being distributed? How is my product doing? But overtime, I’ve come to learn that sometimes these old school industries operate the way they do for a reason. There is so much that can go wrong in wholesale, and the cost of a mistake can set you back millions of dollars. The best way to avoid a costly mistake is to put a human at every step of the process. While this may have been the right approach 20 years ago, in today’s age of AI and automation, it’s no longer the most efficient & cost-effective way. I’m excited about what we are building at Pantry AI. DM me if you want a sneak peek 🙂

At HubSpot, revenue per employee was a metric we talked about a lot. RPE is a pretty common metric for SaaS companies, and in my experience, it forces companies to be strategic with each role, embrace technology, and obsess over efficiency. When starting Pantry AI, I thought this metric would apply to the wholesale ecosystem as well. I was so wrong. Selling into wholesale and food service is a totally different ballgame * I spoke to one brand with 3 people managing their email for incoming wholesale orders. * I spoke to another who hired an overseas team to manage the basics of the wholesale process (i.e., data entry, checking in on the status of orders, etc.) With advances in AI, I see so many opportunities to streamline and automate the wholesale industry.

I recently spoke to a brand doing $200 million in revenue. They do 95% of their business e-commerce and 5% wholesale. But guess what? They spend 25% of their time managing their wholesale channel! That’s a crazy amount of time, money, and resources to spend on a channel that accounts for 5% of your revenue. Why is wholesale so complicated? Everyone does things differently, different systems, different processes, a million exceptions. It’s not as easy as setting up a digital storefront and routing to a tech-enabled 3pl. With advances in technology, we at Pantry believe change is inevitable. In 10 years, the people will still be here, but the problems will be abstracted away. Getting customers the products they need will be as easy as the consumer experiences we are used to. See you there ⌛