My Top 5 Tips for Selling to Restaurants

today I want to talk to you guys about five of my best tips if you want to sell restaurants and one thing that's great about selling to restaurants when you're a small farm or a market garden is they allow you to scale your production very quickly because they'll buy a lot of certain products and if you know what the market is demanding if you know what these chefs are looking for they'll allow you to grow a lot of certain products and scale those products and move them in all one direction so it makes it easy to move large volumes of things so on my farm for example like I've sold to many different chefs over the years and my farm has been in different size and sort of the years I've been started at a half acre was two and a half acres I've grown all kinds of vegetables but that some of the crops for example that they allow you to scale is for one solid greens you can be delivering boxes of salad greens for a restaurant posts having to bag them in individual bags and put them in a CSA or so on a farmers market radishes we move a ton of radishes I only sell them to chefs so we'll have 50 foot beds of radishes and turnips turnips is another one and we'll crop that out and it all goes to just a couple chefs so it means that I can move a lot of product quickly from a production standpoint that's great because I can get it out of the ground really quickly and get something else in there so allows you to move volume yes you are going to sell things a little bit cheaper when you tell the restaurants but that's okay that's that's the trade-off that you make to move a lot of product in a short amount of time so let's get into these top five all right number one fresh sheets you got to make fresh sheets this is a fresh sheet I read about it in my book I'll show you how to make it I even give you a template you can download it on my website on how to make it you can just copy mine rip it off basically what a fresh sheet is is it is just a quick summary of what you're selling what the price is what the volume you're selling it in it's just a really fast and easy way for you to communicate with your customers to let them know what you got for sale I comes out every single week you want to be consistent with it especially when you're getting started it's very important to just pinging these chefs to you know these these guys have people coming at them all the time if you're in a farm saturated place like I am there's farmers knocking on the back door every single day especially with the hip and you know the cool restaurant that all the farmers want to sell at everybody is bugging them so you got to stay on top of it you got to be consistent and one thing with fresh sheets is one little piece of advice Minh as many but one little piece of advice is only list the things on the fresh sheet that you know you have a lot of because a bad situation to get in is where you lift every single thing you have and you're listing things that you know you only have you know 10 pounds or 10 units of and so on and so forth and then you're short and so then you get more orders than you expected and now you're going to call these people and say oh I know you ordered this but I'm short so you want to just list the things you know you have in abundance and you know what what I would do with my close relationships that I have with chefs that I've worked with for years is I'll list all the things on the fresh sheet that I have a lot of and if I only know I have some of this and some of that all just text message or phone or email my closest customers to say hey I have this for you I know you normally want it and then you don't list it on the fresh sheet that way you're not going to short new customers that you're trying to build a relationship with you know it's better to under promise and over deliver number two is have things in case lot volumes so so at a farmers market we're selling small units for selling bunches and bags and so on and so forth but with chefs we're selling things in case Lots and so that case lot can be whatever you want it to be you've got like it for example I have case lot bags of radishes so it's a five or six pound bag at whatever the price is 25 bucks or something like that you know you you set the price and and you just you just want to have these things in larger units because that way that incentivizes bigger purchases but it also makes it easier for them because most restaurants all restaurants when they're ordering they're looking at their distributor or wholesaler catalogs and everything's listed in case lots it's a box of this is big bags of that you know it's groupings of this or that so that you want to mimic that and do the same thing so you know you're selling Tomatoes in a 10 or 15 pound flat you're selling a 10 pound box of salad mix or spinach or arugula or a two pound bag a two-pound case lot bag things like that and again that stuff in my book that's even on my website that link will be below you can download that stuff for free but you want to list things in a in a case lot number three is you've got to follow up when you're starting out with restaurants because like I said there's people calling them all the time knocking on the door you got to follow up so if you're building a new relationship or relationship with a new customer and you've only talked to them a few times but they're going to go ahead and and get an order you're going to you're delivering that order say on a Friday you want to follow up with a phone call or a text message or an email phone calls best Doc's you can get them on the phone that's best phone them and just ask them how the product worked asked what you know was everything cool how much is you guys go through did did your customers like it just follow up and show that you care basically show them that that you know you're putting them first and you want to make sure they're satisfied and through those conversations you're going to it's going to lead to many other things it's going to you're going to have conversations where you're just kind of shooting the breeze and they say you know what I like this but you know what it would be better if it was this way or I wish I would have had a little bit more and you know you take notes in these things and then you get to a point where you work with a customer long enough that you'll know how much they're going to use better than they do and I mean because it's easier for you to understand your little niche of bringing them the specific product than it is for a chef to know all the suppliers they're buying from you know it takes them a while to figure out what they they're going to need like I have one customer I've sold to my entire career farming I know what she needs every Tuesday and Friday even when she doesn't know she's when she's not sure she needs something again I know that she does because I look back at the years of records that I've sold to her and I can see the consistency and so you figure those things up I mean you figure those out through the conversations they're getting to know what they're using what they like what they don't like but also just do the patterns of their orders so following up is super key to building those relationships right at the start number 4 super super important 1 I've done a video on this in a different way but you want to set terms of payment so you know that you can decide whatever that is in certain and certain size restaurants have different terms but what terms of payment means is when I deliver you product you're going to either pay me Co D which is cash on delivery or you're going to pay me in a set number of days and so you want to make sure that that's discussed and that's on the invoice and if it's the terms of payment like it's 14 days or 21 days or it's 30 days that that's agreed on and then when they sign the invoice they and you keep that copy for yourself you know that they've consented to okay from 21 days from this invoice you're going to get paid and if you're not getting paid then you got to follow up again and that's a whole other can of worms I've got all kinds of stories regarding that but setting terms of payment is really important and when you're just starting out if you have if you don't have a lot of stuff and you don't know a lot of infrastructure just doing things Co D cash on delivery is the easiest way to go and there's a lot of restaurants that like Co D if they're small if they're like you know a 20 tables kind of thing a couple kitchen stuff Co D can work for them because they've already got enough to do the keys are owner operator type restaurants they've already got enough to do so when you show up the fact that they settle up right then and there is easier for them because then I'll have to do paperwork later they don't flip through invoices and see who they owe money to so smaller restaurants will do that larger restaurants won't they just don't have the ability to do it and there's often many levels of of a hierarchy in that in that restaurant you know that the the restaurant manager is the restaurant manager they're not the person who is doing account payable or they're not the they might not even be the person doing ordering so there's all these different tiers and so on a bigger restaurant you you have to have terms of payment that are you know weeks or you know a month or 28 days or something like that so that that's just kind of part of it and if you're not ready to do that then don't sell to those customers if you're at a point where you need your farm is really small you're just starting out you need cash flow don't go out and seek out those kinds of customers because it does take time to get paid a lot of my customers the bigger restaurants that I sell to at the beginning of the season they I don't get a check for two months but then once two months is up then they're on stream I'm getting each invoice for a while and that's just kind of how it is but I understand that going in so you want to make sure that you're clear about all these things and both parties are fully understanding what's happening you both consent to it number five be consistent with your deliveries set your delivery days lift these things on your fresh eat in in the fresh eat I have on my website I've got right on the bottom you know delivery days are Tuesdays and Fridays if you're going to if you want delivery on Tuesday you got to have your order in Monday morning if you want to delivery on Friday you got to have your order in on Thursday morning so you set those terms but you got to be consistent so it's again don't don't over promise and under deliver under-promise over-deliver but be consistent with these things if you say you know here's an example of under promising and over delivering with delivery days at the beginning of the season we just do Fridays we don't do start doing Tuesday deliveries until till we get busier but I will do Tuesday deliveries to some of my best customers and so that's an under promise and over deliver type thing because then they're happy because they might call me on a Monday go oh man we got totally slammed over the weekend and we sold out of stuff can we get something from you it's like yeah okay well we'll deliver on a Tuesday or you can pick up you know one of the great advantages we have as an urban farm being downtown Colonna is I've got chefs picking up all the time I mean right now we're delivering Tuesdays and Fridays but we have chefs picking up on Mondays after the weekends sometimes Wednesdays sometimes Thursdays who knows and a lot of our customers are really close so we can even you know do top-up deliveries which we will do for our really good customers from time to time if they're close but you want to be consistent with them so set those delivery dates and stick to them and as far as delivering those figure out what your try you're driving figure out what your traffic patterns are and try to deliver when there's not bad tropics don't go out and do deliveries on rush hour especially if you don't have a refrigerated truck because you will be sitting in traffic and in the summertime your produce will be melting so you want to make sure that you're being as effective as you can with your delivery days and you want to be bringing good product to the your customers as well so hope you guys have found that helpful if you're new please hit the subscribe button right now if you want to see more stuff like this and I notice I have a lot of new subscribers and many of you probably don't have my book so I would like to extend a discount code do you buy my book through my website yes it's not as cheap as Amazon but consider it you're supporting me I can't compete with Amazon shipping but what I can do is offer some extra value so if you hit that discount code down below you can get my book with a product called digital tools package which is a series of videos which explains how to use some of the spreadsheets and things that I write about in my book how to use them in detail so it's a bunch of extra content for free if you're interested in supporting me and reading my book so hit that that link below and check out the discount code talk to you guys later [Music]

Channel: Urban Farmer Curtis Stone

Views: 193,089

Rating: 4.9497375 out of 5

Keywords: gardening, how to, growing, urban farming, spin farming, vegetables, greens, growing better, high yield crops, get started, sustainable, fertilizer, soil, local, permaculture, off grid, homestead, kelowna, curtis stone, curtis, green city acres, profitable farming, the urban farmer, suburban farming, convert lawn to garden, bc, canada, urban agriculture, market gardening, restaurants, selling to restaurants, farmers and chef's, selling to chef's, garden, organic, sustainability, make money

Id: PiEezLltQGg

Length: 12min 55sec (775 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 13 2017