Joining Forces: Our work with our trusted supplier, Bidfood

20 February 2024

Bidfood are a leading foodservice wholesaler who supply fresh food, frozen food, ambient food, beers, wines, spirits, catering essentials, and catering equipment to customers in a wide range of sectors. Being a robust supplier, with 26 depots nationwide (and two more coming in 2024), Bidfood can offer valuable local support and knowledge to clients – on average, our depots are just 26 miles away from our 40,000 customers in the UK.

We have had a long standing and strong relationship with Bidfood for over 15 years and view the company as one of our key strategic wholesalers. We are thrilled that our partnership with Bidfood has allowed a mutually beneficial relationship to grow, with Bidfood benefitting from our food category expertise, strong network of industry relationships and a wide range of clients, whilst we benefit from their breadth of suppliers nationwide, allowing us to provide our clients with local and high-quality ingredients. Bidfood also engage with our clients to support on services such as product sampling, range optimisation and cost reduction. This partnership means that we can support Bidfood with understanding the needs of their clients and to assist on specific projects.

Key Achievements

• Built a strong relationship with Bidfood which resulted in mutual growth for both businesses and enhancing food procurement operations for multiple clients.
• Utilised our effective communication skills to build further relationships throughout the supply chain and to develop a clear understanding of various client’s needs
• Utilised industry and food category expertise to thoroughly understand the needs of clients and translated this back to Bidfood in a way they could understand
• Gave Bidfood access to EPSYS, our market-leading eProcurement and Procure to Pay system, which streamlines the ordering process
• Worked with Bidfood, providing integral support to help client’s hit their sustainability targets.

Communication is key

At Foodbuy, we are always pushing to develop stronger relationships with clients and suppliers to help more and more businesses run smooth procurement operations. We pride ourselves on the fact that our hard work has resulted in a very strong network and are constantly looking at new ways to utilise this to benefit our clients and their procurement needs. With Bidfood, over the last year alone, we have managed to win four new clients through our communicative network. This has massively strengthened our partnership with Bidfood further and ultimately provides them with stronger relationships throughout the supply chain.

Alongside this, we pride ourselves on our high level of expertise in a wide range of food categories. This adds huge value to our relationships, by ensuring that we can effectively communicate specific details about how we can support our clients. Our relationship with Bidfood is no exception, with our clear communication skills allowing us to develop a thorough understanding of the needs of each individual client, then use our culinary expertise to effectively translate each party’s needs to the other. This allowed for appropriate and efficient service to benefit Bidfood and a range of clients, through refined support and effective communications. Tim Adams, Sales and Marketing Director at Bidfood said:

“Foodbuy are really good at being able to talk to the client directly to understand their needs and then translate them back in a way that we can understand, and then flex our service offer to meet that”

E-fficiency: Optimised online procurement

We pride ourselves on being able to offer our clients smooth and hassle-free procurement operations. By becoming one of our trusted suppliers, Bidfood have been able to utilise our market-leading eProcurement and Procure to Pay system, EPSYS, which streamlines clients’ ordering process. Used and trusted by a whole host of organisations, from single location to group operations, EPSYS has been specifically developed to cope with the complexities of the hospitality industry. It streamlines the workload associated with processing potentially thousands of financial transactions and maximises the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the buying process, saving businesses a load of time and money. By building this relationship with us, Bidfood could now provide their clients with access to EPSYS, giving their clients the advantageous ability to step back and focus on other areas of their business.

We are thrilled that we have been able to support Bidfood throughout our partnership and combine forces to expose our trusted supplier to more contacts, and therefore clients, throughout the supply chain.

Tim Adams, Sales and Marketing Director at Bidfood said:

“The really important thing about Foodbuy is that they add value into the relationship. They’ve got culinary expertise, and we’re able to transition that across to the client. Their EPSYS system is something that we know clients really really value”

To find out more about how our expertise can benefit your business, contact Gordon.turner@foodbuy.co.uk