Driving Sales

Working from a supplier standpoint our goal is to continue to drive sales in our business. The problem is that our clients sales are down 10-20% across the board. We have a small percentage of savvy business owners that are turning these challenges into opportunities but this outlook and confidence is rare in the food service business. Some major city operators are using mobile food trucks to supplement their in-house operations and are being very successful. That being said how many mobile operations are going to succeed before the market becomes saturated?

So the question is how do we as suppliers broker and help the end users make contact with our direct customers, the restaurateurs? We need to bridge the gap between end user and restaurateur as owners are cutting costs and doing the bare minimum to get by. Theoretically the operators know that innovation can help them drive sales but that will require a steep learning curve and potentially could mean taking risks in the business that make the operator feel uneasy.

More and more operators are going up for sale or going out of business everyday and maybe this is part of the natural business cycle. I do have trouble believing that these companies are doing all the right things to keep their business afloat in a tight economy because others are succeeding.

I would love to hear some success stories and failures to relate to this issue?