Direct sales forces help operators streamline menus and labor with fully prepared food.
April 6, 2021
Sponsored by Hormel Foodservice
Change is a constant in restaurants, but no one anticipated the changes COVID-19 would force upon the entire industry. From raw ingredient purchasing, to food prep, to cooking and packaging it safely for delivery or carryout—and then sanitizing everything in sight—the industry may never return to pre-pandemic routines.
But what the pandemic hasn’t changed is the industry’s collaborative nature. When dining-room shutdowns prevented customers from eating inside restaurants, food manufacturers moved to help operators create and improve delivery and carryout channels—sometimes in eateries that had never sold meals for off-premise consumption. Serving the unique needs of such customers successfully comes from personal connections, which is one reason why Hormel Foodservice has maintained a direct sales team since its founding in 1990.
“We talk regularly about intentional curiosity, meaning we ask a lot of questions about an operator’s menu, the operation itself and what its patrons want from that experience,” says Annemarie Vaupel, vice president of marketing at Hormel Foodservice. “We go into an operation seeking the operator’s needs first. That person’s agenda is more important than our desire to sell something.”
Shawn McGuire was desperate for help when the pandemic shutdown slashed sales at the 12-unit Guido’s Premium Pizza in Detroit. For much of last spring, he reduced expenses by furloughing nearly all his cooks and drivers and working every day running Guido’s lone corporate store largely by himself. Just when he thought things couldn’t get worse, an ingredient shortage hit.
“Some manufacturers couldn’t get people to come to work at their plants because employees were afraid of the virus,” McGuire says. “And when those shortages started to hit us, I called my Hormel Foodservice rep who told me, ‘You guys are extremely important to us, and we’re going to do everything we can to not let you run out.’ And he pulled some strings for us. That was a big thing for me.”
Labor saviors
The cost of kitchen labor was already a concern long before the pandemic hit, and by May 2020, a Datassential report said 63 percent of operators had reduced staff to match the slower pace of business. Worse, as cooks and chefs contracted the virus and were quarantined, previously reduced staffs were stretched thinner to produce the same amount of food.
One short- and long-term solution to the problem is using fully cooked proteins to streamline prep, shorten cook times and generate a variety of menu options for guests, says David Weber, vice president of sales for Hormel Foodservice.
“Chefs want to put out great food, but they don’t have the employees to do it all from scratch,” Weber says. With prep efficiencies increased, chefs gain the option of cutting staff hours or employing fewer cooks. “We see a lot of opportunities to help chefs with speed-scratch items that remove much of the prep work from the picture, and we can point to items that reduce or eliminate labor.”
Weber mentioned the portfolio of Premium Prepared Proteins, which includes fully cooked chicken, beef, pork and turkey products that remove time-intensive efforts like smoking, braising and roasting.
“Chefs and cooks can let us take care of things like that while they spend more time making every plate look awesome,” Weber says. “We look for peripheral items on menus that make labor a challenge, and we see if we can’t find a better product fit for that operator. Our goal is to make them more efficient in every area of the kitchen.”
After a career as a foodservice distributor representative, Chip Herchert tried his hand at restaurant ownership in 2012. During the menu test for his first concept, Sidebar at Whiskey Row, in Louisville, Kentucky, there was a burger topped with pulled pork—a product that was the only smoked item in the kitchen. Without a smoker, he had to source the pulled pork if the burger was to make the final menu.
“I knew from living in Texas what good barbecue was, so I was interested when our Hormel Foodservice rep told me they had AUSTIN BLUES® Smoked Meats,” Herchert says. “We wanted the burger to be great and we wanted to say it was our own. It was a great solution.”
Closing in on a decade as restaurant owner led Herchert to revisit a valuable lesson he learned as a distributor rep.
“I knew there were only three things I could do for an operator: Save them money, make them money or solve their problems,” says Herchert. “A heat-and-eat item like the fully cooked HORMEL® FIRE BRAISED™ short rib—that’s solving a problem for me when I can’t find cooks who can do that consistently. We need these things these days.”
Meaningful collaboration that benefits the bottom line is just one of many byproducts of using a direct salesforce, says Weber.
“By going direct, we build tight relationships with operators,” says Weber. “The level of interaction leads to ideas and solutions that make them more efficient with their labor and more able to put out the great food that customers want.”
To learn more about how your operation can benefit from the Hormel Foodservice direct sales model, visit our partner website’s We Hear You page.
