HORECA supply: the chef is not your shopper

Taking your retail SKU, your retail price list and your retail pitch into a restaurant group is the most common way brands waste a year in this channel. Almost nothing carries over. The pack is wrong, the price is measured on a different basis, and the thing that keeps the account has very little to do with the product.

The pack is a working format, not a shelf format

A kitchen does not display your pack. It opens it, decants it and works out of it during a service. So the format is judged on things a shelf never asks about. How much bench space it takes. Whether one person can lift and pour it without spilling. Whether it reseals once opened. Whether it fits the storage the property already has. Whether it gets used up before quality drops after opening.

That usually means larger units than retail, but not always. A high value ingredient used in small quantities can need a smaller pack in a kitchen than on a shelf, because a large one will be opened, half used and thrown away. The question is not how big. It is how much gets consumed between opening and the point where the product stops performing.

Settle the practical things before you quote. The case configuration a delivery vehicle and a store room can actually handle. Whether the pack survives being stacked in a cold room. Whether the printing is enough for staff to identify it correctly at speed. These are different questions from the ones you answer when you build a consumer range, and the answers do not transfer between the two.

A chef buys cost per portion, not MRP

The number a chef compares suppliers on is what your product costs inside a finished dish. That is your unit price divided by usable output, after trim, after evaporation, after whatever the product loses in the process. A product that costs more per kilogram and yields more usable output is the cheaper product, and a good kitchen will work that out before you do.

This is why arguing price with a specifier usually goes nowhere and arguing yield often works. Bring the calculation with you. How many portions from a unit at the specification they run, and what that makes the ingredient cost per plate. Be honest about it, because they will check it in their own kitchen within a fortnight and a number that does not hold up ends the conversation.

MRP is close to irrelevant to this discussion. It is not the basis on which you are being compared, and building your institutional price as a discount off a retail number is how brands end up holding a rate they cannot afford.

Your branding is doing almost nothing here

The guest who eats the dish never sees your pack. There is no shelf, no impulse decision and no consumer who chose you by name. That removes the part of your price which retail branding normally justifies, and most brands underestimate how much of their pricing quietly rests on it.

It does not remove brand entirely. The specifier knows your name, and a name they trust reduces the work of defending the choice internally. But the pack itself can be plain, and the money you would spend making it attractive is better spent making it identifiable and easy to handle. Clear product name, clear batch and date marking, clear specification. Staff working at speed need to grab the right thing without reading.

Availability beats price, because there is no substitute at seven in the evening

A retailer that runs out of your product loses a sale and the shopper buys something else. A kitchen that runs out mid service cannot make the dish. There is no substitute available at that hour, the menu is already printed and the failure is visible to the guest. That asymmetry is why delivery frequency and dependability are worth more to a HORECA account than a lower rate, and why buyers in this channel will pay for a supplier who does not make them think about it.

It also changes how you plan supply. Institutional demand is steadier than retail demand, which makes it easier to forecast, but it is unforgiving on the day. Brands entering the channel routinely underestimate how often they will need to deliver and try to solve it with one bigger drop, which the property has nowhere to store.

The leak that undercuts your own trade

Institutional prices usually sit below retail, for reasons that are perfectly sound. Bigger units, no consumer marketing carried in the price, and volume. The risk that follows is straightforward. If the same physical pack can be sold in a retail environment, some of it will be, and you will have funded the discounting of your own trade.

Two controls do most of the work. Make the institutional format genuinely unsuitable for a shelf, in size and in labelling, so it cannot simply be moved across. Then write down who is permitted to sell it and make that a term of supply with whoever services the account, whether that is you directly or an intermediary. If you are already seeing your bulk format in a retail environment, the problem sits upstream of pricing and no price list will fix it.

Accounts are lost on service, not on product

Very few HORECA accounts are lost because the product stopped being good. They are lost because a delivery was missed during a busy week, because two consignments were not the same specification, or because the property could not reach anyone when something went wrong and had to solve it themselves at eight in the morning.

Three things hold an account here. One named contact who knows the account and answers, not a general line. A specification that does not drift, including the attributes nobody wrote down, such as colour, moisture or grind. And a delivery pattern built around how the property works, which means their service days and their receiving hours rather than your route plan.

When you lose an account in this channel you will usually be told it was price. Ask the specifier separately. It very often was not.