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APR. MAY. 2021 XIV be caught unprepared. Strategies and structures must be ready. If you had to use three nouns to describe the best way for a wholesaler to deal with this situation, which would you choose? Knowledge/training. In a world that is changing fast and has been “overwhelmed” in the last year, wholesalers need to be prepared on several fronts, not only on the more traditional activities (purchasing, warehouse management, logistics, ...), but it is important to have ever broader skills on the market and trends, on management control, marketing, analysis of financial flows, All this also leads to the need to increase the skills of their agents through training (on sales and negotiation techniques, interpersonal skills, time management, etc.) to develop a more consultative approach to sales, directing their time not so much to taking orders but to understanding the needs of consumers, telling them about products and proposing innovative and higher-value services. Selection. Increasingly, wholesalers will have to select the companies they work with, both in terms of the industry and the customers they serve, in order to create solid partnerships and offer increasingly targeted products and services. It will also be essential to select customers based not only on their ability to pay in the short term, but also on their reactivity and entrepreneurship, to support the most resilient and dynamic companies in overcoming these difficult times. Digitisation. Digital tools have entered into the operations of many sectors; in the case of wholesale, consolidated and recurring orders may go online, while orders for more specialised products or new products that need to be explained, narrated or given guidance on how to offer them will continue to remain offline. Wholesalers will have to work more and more to create on-line ordering platforms, favouring the automatic re-ordering of continuous products with a higher rotation. One of the current problems faced by restaurateurs is stock management. What solutions could a supplier adopt to help its customer manage this difficulty? The role of F&B wholesalers will remain crucial because of the key function they play in the supply chain. Wholesalers could help restaurateurs by enabling them, as mentioned above, to place orders quickly, including online, through proprietary or shared platforms (consortia could also play an important role here), accepting smaller purchase orders, increasing delivery frequency, analysing assortments and selecting production companies for each category with which to collaborate to develop different product sizes. This brings us back to the issue of selecting and creating solid partnerships with suppliers in order to meet the needs of our customers with increasingly customised ranges and services. In your opinion, is it useful to focus on a specific target? Why? There is no single winning solution: each choice requires you to analyse your business model, your activities, your income statement structure, your strengths and weaknesses, your market/catchment area and your customers, the changes taking place in the market in order to define the most effective strategies. Generally speaking, the ‘easiest’ way is to increase sales to existing customers as much as possible by responding to their needs with customised assortments and value-added services. However, at a time when demand has dropped - and all the more so if one’s chosen targets are those in greatest difficulty (nightclubs, hotels, lunch bars, etc.) - it is advisable not to reduce the targets but to serve additional ones and therefore go in the direction of expanding the customer base, always keeping in mind, however, to segment one’s customers/prospects in order to offer them products and services in line with their needs. A further way of increasing revenues, by intercepting even more diverse targets, is to diversify the business into other activities: sub-wholesale, door-to- door to end consumers, downstream integration by opening sales/consumer outlets, creation of online sales sites for consumer outlets or end consumers. However, these are very costly initiatives, requiring specific skills and a careful assessment of costs and revenues and competition. ______________________________ BOX NEW TRENDS FROM CHINA China, where it all started, seems to be the first to recover, even in the restaurant industry. Several measures have been taken to bring customers back to restaurants, albeit in a different way than in the past. First of all, contactless systems have been boosted when ordering, paying for and collecting ready meals, also managed through vending machines or kiosks with robots. Some establishments have removed their tables to encourage take-away, while others have launched promotions dedicated to those who eat lunch or dinner alone, to stimulate safe consumption. Incentive systems such as point collections and discount cards have been adopted to encourage people to return to eating out. Probably not all these solutions are suitable for a country like Italy, where conviviality remains an important value, but some of them could be taken up and adapted to our reality. ______________________________ AT PAGE 38 IN THE KITCHEN SAFE REOPENING Sanitise to start again. Here are the basic rules to minimise the risk of contagion by Maria Elena Dipace As is well known, the terrible healthcare MAGAZINE