How to get your restaurant suppliers to help get you more customers

A minority of suppliers actively work with restaurants to promote their products, the rest, well, just supply!
Of course not all suppliers are interested in promoting to your customers. There isn’t much of a consumer market for commercial dishwashers…
But your food and drink suppliers often sell to consumers as well as
restaurants. Here is how to develop ‘win, win, win’ situations where you, the supplier and your customers benefit.

• Drinks companies often have large marketing budgets, you can persuade them to move some of that budget to you, (if not you can always take your business somewhere else!)
• Local food suppliers don’t have large budgets but on the other hand they are usually desperate for cost effective marketing techniques.

Drinks companies

Offer to set up a trial and tasting promotion for a whisky or liqueur. Put this promotion on at your low spend times so that you are not cannabalising sales.
Present the drink in branded glasses with a bit of ceremony. Get your supplier to train your staff so that they can act as brand ambassadors.
Make sure you collect the email addresses of the customers who have tried the product. Offer to email a follow up promotion, like a retail voucher, or a bit of market research for the drinks company. Done properly this can mean that the promotion “pays for itself” for the drinks company. (Which means that they can do lots more with you).
Do, learn and tweak. There is no reason why you can’t do one every month.

Local food companies

If you make a special effort to use local ingredients and suppliers then you can do great things with these companies.
Let’s say you use heritage tomatoes from a local grower.
Do a deal where they give you free stock to produce an extra “ameuse gueule” or extra course.
Arrange a deal whereby each diner gets a money off voucher to use at the supplier’s farm shop.
Talk about the product on your website or social media. Send a promotion to your user base when you do your next email blast.

Promotion mechanism