Why retail ordering got solved, and what to do about foodservice
Most Australian food and beverage suppliers run two businesses side by side. One is quiet. The other is not.
Retail is the quiet one. Orders arrive electronically, in a standard format, already validated, and go straight into the system. Nobody reads them. On a busy Monday nobody thinks about them at all.
Foodservice is the other one. Orders arrive by phone, by email, by fax, from a rep and through a portal, and every one of them ends with a person typing.
Same company, same warehouse, same trucks. More than four in five of the suppliers we have asked describe exactly that: digital at both ends, manual in the middle.
Retail got solved because someone made it happen
Australian grocery is concentrated. A handful of chains take the overwhelming majority of packaged grocery, and each settled on electronic data interchange as the way orders would be placed. Compliance was not a strategic choice. It was the price of the account.
Foodservice has no equivalent. Around 59,000 venues, eighty per cent independent and owner-operated, and no group large enough to impose anything. An independent cafe has no procurement system and no reason to want one — it has an owner who knows what they are short of at six in the morning and picks up the phone.
So the channels are not a transitional mess on the way to something tidier. They are the settled position, and they are not going to change.
What it costs, briefly
Not the typing. The typing is the smallest part.
It is the order that arrives through a channel nobody is watching, and the call that follows — we never received it. A credit note, a remade delivery, a truck routed twice, and a customer who starts taking a competitor's call.
None of it appears as a line item, which is exactly why it survives. And while intake stays manual, every venue you win adds hours before it adds margin.
What does not work
Telling customers to use your portal. The portal becomes the seventh channel, not a replacement for the first six. The venue keeps ringing and the rep keeps saying yes, because the venue has no reason to change and the rep has every reason not to force it.
Adding people. It works until it doesn't, and it makes the problem invisible rather than smaller — the cost moves into overtime and stays unmeasured.
Waiting for a standard. Retail's standard arrived because two buyers could insist. Nobody in foodservice can.
What does work
Stop trying to change how orders arrive. Change what happens after they do.
One intake, six doors. Every channel routes to the same place — email, portal, rep, telesales, electronic data interchange. The customer notices nothing. They order the way they always have.
Validated before anyone touches it. Against the customer, the price file, minimum order quantities and available stock. Errors surface at arrival, not at the pick face or on the invoice.
One flow from there. Allocation across your own warehouses and any third-party logistics sites, pick and pack, GS1 and retailer-compliant labelling, advance shipping notices on dispatch, invoice generated automatically and posted into the accounting system you already run.
And you can see it. Live stock across sites, lot and expiry tracking, delivery performance by supplier. The things that are currently reconstructed from memory on a Monday.
The point is not that the software is clever. It is that the middle finally has an owner.
Where to start
Before looking at any system, count three things for one week.
How many channels orders actually arrive through. Ask the order desk, not the org chart — most people say four and find six.
How many handoffs between the customer sending it and the warehouse picking it. Every time it changes hands or changes format is one.
How often you hear "we never received it." That is the number that turns this from an irritation into a business case, and almost nobody is counting it.
If those three numbers are lower than you expected, you do not have this problem. If they are higher, you have a measurable one — which is a much better position than an unmeasured one.
Your customers will order however they want. What happens next is within your control.
How many different ways do your customers send you orders, and who is watching all of them?
Australian foodservice market figures: Australian Foodservice Advocacy Body, State of the Foodservice Industry Report 2024.