With 3 tips more grip on the changing B2B food market

Let's start with good news: the food market is currently number 1 when it comes to growth in eCommerce! Now this concerns both the B2C and B2B food companies, but this is still an interesting development. In the meantime, 80% of the purchase of products by food professionals takes place online. All well, but 98% of B2B buyers are forced to seek offline help from a representative at some point due to a lack of online information. Room for improvement!

In this blog we share three tips to get you started on an improvement that responds to the changing B2B food market.

Tip 1 - Ease of ordering, ease of ordering and even more ease of ordering

It is sometimes forgotten that a B2B customer is also a consumer. It is therefore just as important in a B2B webshop to share extensive information about the product. Online an important part of the decision-making process for purchasing a product is missing: seeing, feeling and smelling. The lack of a clear product photo is therefore really a missed opportunity.

Consumers are increasingly eating outside of their homes and labor shortages are still increasing, so the pressure on the catering industry is high and orders from wholesalers have to be made fast. Customers want to be able to order easily and fast. Therefore, offer a mobile-friendly webshop with all important B2B food eCommerce functionalities:

• Creating and managing order lists
  
• Real-time stock information and delivery date
• Split orders by delivery date
• Placing and canceling orders
• Insight into invoices and returns

For most customers, their loyalty to one company is less important than an efficient and flexible ordering process. An omnichannel shopping experience is therefore becoming the new standard. The customer wants to be able to place and view orders from any device at any time.

Tip 2 - Sell your products through different channels

Following tip 1, customers also increasingly want to be able to do their shopping from one central system. This can be purchasing systems, but also online marketplaces. A 2019 Shopping Tomorrow survey found that leading food brands expect food marketplaces to have virtually replaced wholesalers by 2025. You no longer get away with having a webshop as the only sales channel.

We are also seeing the emergence of the Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) model. With this model you delivers directly to the consumer. Consumers find sustainability increasingly important and therefore demand more transparency in the manner of production. By purchasing directly from the producer, the customer knows exactly what he is buying and there is a step less in the Food miles, or the distance that the product travels to the front door.

Tip 3 - Be relevant for you customer

You can no longer do without data. Data is the gold with which you can make more targeted predictions for sales and capacity, and just as important, you can communicate more relevant and personal with your customer. Personalization is a real must-have. The customer has little time and wants to be able to order quickly. What's in it for them to struggle through the entire range of products?

By showing a customer-specific offer, proposing order lists or products based on historical sales and working with customer-specific prices, a customer feels he is being heard and seen. And how fun is it if you share inspiring content focused on order history, for example about dishes that you can make with a certain product? With that, you really make the difference!

Curious for more tips?

Are you inspired by the above three tips and curious about more ideas to grow with the developments in the B2B food market? Download the whitepaper below How to take a bigger bite out of the B2B eCommerce food market?