Tips for Evaluating Foodservice Vendors

Foodservice consultants can help clients find and retain good vendors using these tips

In the foodservice industry, you simply cannot survive without good vendors and suppliers. After all, food and beverage vendors are supplying the key ingredient for the dining experience. Without quality food ingredients, restaurants cannot deliver the quality meals their customers expect. Other vendors, such as signage vendors, POS vendors, and equipment vendors also have an impact on the overall customer experience.

Finding the best vendors and maintaining good relationships with them is obviously critical for success. Often, companies turn to foodservice consultants for help setting up the initial vendor relationships. To ensure that clients continue to receive quality service from their vendors, foodservice consultants need to set up a process that the clients can use to track and evaluate vendor performance on an ongoing basis. Here are some tips on how to make this happen.

Choose a Digital Tool

The tools that a restaurant or other foodservice company uses to track and evaluate vendor performance will have a huge impact on the success of the endeavor. Rather than relying on pen and paper, you will definitely want a digital tool. This will not only save employees time and effort, but also ensure that data on vendor performance is easily available in a single system—ideally one with cloud storage.

Decide What to Track

Foodservice consultants should help their clients figure out what their specific business needs from its vendors. Then, these points can be tracked using the digital tool. Possible examples of key performance indicators to track include percentage of on-time deliveries, return rate, timeliness of responses to queries or complaints, number of customer complaints on a vendor’s product, etc. Tracking may be ongoing, with data being input into the tool constantly, or accomplished through periodic audits involving surveys of customers and employees.

Have a Process for Dealing with Problems

The most successful client-vendor relationships are cooperative, not adversarial. Threatening to fire the vendor every time there is a problem won’t foster a good relationship, and it can actually harm the client if they end up with too much turnover in their vendors. A better approach is to thoroughly document vendor problems using the digital tool. The client can then go to the vendor with documentation of the problems, issue a warning, and give the vendor an opportunity to improve rather than immediately firing them.

Don’t Forget to Track Client Performance

Just as clients want to work with good vendors, vendors prefer good clients. It’s important to track the foodservice company’s own performance with respect to their obligations to the vendor, such as making payments on time.

MyFieldAudits Can Help

MyFieldAudits is an excellent example of a digital tool that can be used to track and evaluate vendors. MyFieldAudits is very easy to use for auditing as well as for collecting data through surveys and other sources. MyFieldAudits includes robust reporting functions that can be used to provide a real-time picture of vendor performance so foodservice companies can take action if and when they need to.

To learn more about MyFieldAudits, contact us at info@MyFieldAudits.com for a free demo.