“Foodservice is how we grew up in this business more than 30 years ago,” said Scott King, vice president of sales at Baldor. “We serve everyone from the corner pubs to the Michelin-Star restaurants—anyone who needs quality food. We service 75 percent of those Michelin-Star restaurants in our regions, and we are proud we are able to meet the high standards of those institutions.”“This year, we’ve hired our first-ever chief digital and information officer, Satyan Parameswaran, who came from UPS, where he was president of IT,” King said. “His job is to help people get what they want and what they need more efficiently. We’ve made a lot of visual improvements that have been great for our customers.”
The biggest challenge in foodservice is the need for speed and transparency, and Baldor has done well evolving and adapting to those challenges by putting technology at the forefront.
That includes making improvements to the Baldor app, where a lot of orders come through, order tracking online and the company recently launched a new home page.
“We host Baldor BITE every other year, and we had our biggest one this April; it’s a full-day party and food show that I feel is not like any other,” King said. “It’s a great way to introduce our chef customers to our vendors. We had 200 vendors and north of 2,500 customers in attendance.”
Baldor has a term it uses in-house called, “Radical Hospitality,” where it tries to drive the best customer experience, and those recent advancements help the company live up to its goals.
Seasonal menus often dictate the items that are trending at Baldor, though weather or crop challenges can change the course of direction.
“With produce specifically, we see a lot of growth in romaine lettuce,” King said. “Avocados are still bursting at the seams with growth over prior year and is one of the best-selling items.”
The keys to success in foodservice comes down to listening to customers, knowing what they need and being both a partner and consultant.
“Chefs are busy and know what they need, and have different obstacles they need to overcome, and we need to partner with them to know how to do that,” King said. “We need to provide on-time delivery and in-full, otherwise you can be disruptive to their business. It’s about giving one-on-one interaction and supporting the customer on its journey.”
