Our flour, sugar, and oil expenses have shot up by nearly 18% over the past quarter. We really don’t want to raise our menu prices again since customers are already price-sensitive. Are you all shopping around between multiple distributors or sticking with one to get volume discounts?
We split our orders now. Dry goods come from a main bulk distributor, while dairy comes from a local co-op. Sticking to just one supplier was costing us a fortune because they knew we were too lazy to compare price sheets.
Splitting orders is the way to go. We regularly compare price sheets across various food distributors – we monitor sites like food distributors alongside our main cash-and-carry catalog every month. It takes an extra hour of admin work per week, but it saved us around 12% on pantry staples alone.
