The Retail Perspective: The Retail Food Buyer Pitch Meeting

Recap: The more we know about what food buyers are looking for in a vendor partner, the better we are at helping our clients. We conducted over 25 in-depth retail food buyer interviews and surveyed several thousand more for my book: 
Moving Your Brand Up the Food Chain. The buyers were from all size stores, big chains to small independents.

Picking up from:

• #1 Be Persistent:
• #2: Why Your Brand?
• #3: Be A Good Partner
• #4: Show Your Category Expertise
• #5: Differentiate Your Brand

How much does marketing affect your decision to list a product?

Hearing dozens of retail food buyer pitch meeting comments, they all seem to be following a familiar theme. Including how to be the right partner, be the expert in your category, have a good brand story, create demand to help sell your product – all things that make up a good brand selling story.

So maybe, you’re buyer pitch meeting, or presentation is less about your product ingredients, features, and benefits, or pricing.

Also, more about creating a compelling selling story that illustrates how you plan to partner with the buyer so you both experience success in his planogram.

Part of that may be sharing your research with them: what’s happening in competitive POG in your category?

Know the trends. From industry to category to a product line and how can you help navigate that with the buyer as a partner.

Another part is committing a budget to a marketing plan to support turns on the shelf, even if it is an in-house branded social media program.

Can you put that in a simple diagram that shows what you’re doing and when? Can you talk about how you’d like to discuss in-store promotions and how you’re going to promote that on social media?

Package up your marketing plan into a sell sheet with a schedule and everything….share this with the buyer so they know you are supporting consumer demand!

Pro Tip: Committing to marketing to support turns on the shelf. Work with your food buyer on in-store promotions and how you’re going to promote that on social media. Even on a tiny emerging food brand budget, you can create a strategic and targeted social media program that can drive traffic to retail outlets.

The Key Takeaway: Market to Drive Sales

BONUS QUESTION: What is a question you wish new or current food manufacturers would ask?

Here is what the retail food buyers said:

Protip: Some things you can’t coach: don’t take “NO” sitting down!

If you have any questions or would like to talk more about your retail food buyer pitch meeting or how to cost-efficiently market your brand from the competition, please reach out to the NewPoint team. If you are interested in more food marketing topics, please visit our Food for Thought page or check out NewPoint’s Patrick Nycz’s book: Moving Your Brand Up the Food Chain.