Last week’s money was already yours. This week’s is the money you can still go get.
Last week we went looking for money that was already yours, the credits sitting on your statements waiting to be claimed. This week is the other side of that coin. Not the money sitting still, but the money you can still go get.
So if you sat down today to tighten up what you’re paying your vendors, where would you start? Most operators answer with one word: everywhere. And everywhere is exactly why the project never gets finished. The list is too long, the categories blur together, and three hours in you’re comparing case prices on something you buy twice a month. So make it smaller. Start with ten.
Not any ten. The ten items that cost you the most money, measured by dollars, not by volume. That difference matters more than it sounds. You almost certainly have an item you move a ton of that still doesn’t crack your top ten in total spend. And you almost certainly have a quiet line sitting near the top that never gets a second look, because nobody thinks of it as a big number. Pull your spend for the period, sort it by dollars, and let the numbers tell you where the leverage is instead of your gut.
And before anyone gets nervous, a fresh quote isn’t going behind anyone’s back, and it isn’t a threat to a supplier you like. It’s information. It’s just knowing what these things really cost right now, and you only get that if you go ask.
That’s the top-line version, and for a lot of operators it’s the right one. If you run a single location, ten items across the board is plenty to start moving the needle. If you want more depth, and you have the time for it, you can go more granular. Top five in food, top five in supplies, your biggest non-food and beverage lines. Push it further and you’re doing top five inside each food subcategory: meat, fish, dairy, produce, grocery. Just know the trade you’re making. Every layer of detail lengthens the list, pulls in more vendors, and surfaces more spec variation to reconcile, and that’s real time. Even the lighter version, ten items for a single location, is an hour or two once you count pulling the numbers, making the calls, and lining the quotes up side by side. Go granular, or go multi-unit and multi-state, and you’re into several hours of real analysis every time you run it. Done on any kind of regular cadence, that’s usually the exact reason these reviews quietly stop happening. Match the depth to the time you actually have.
One more edit before you start. Consider pulling your non-negotiables off the list. Spirits and certain alcoholic beverages, for example, where you’ve got little real room to move. Taking them out doesn’t cost you anything. It just concentrates your attention on the items where you do have leverage.
The work itself is straightforward. Identify the items. Identify where you’re buying each one today. Compare the pricing and the value, not just the number on the invoice. And where there’s a chance to lock something in for a defined period at a fair cost, take it. Committed pricing keeps the supply chain moving, lets everyone plan, and protects you from the out-of-stocks, shorts, and last-minute substitutions that are almost always the byproduct of chasing the lowest price with no relationship behind it. A longer position hold asks a little more from both sides: committed pricing from the vendor, and enough trust in the relationship to stand behind it.
Here’s the part most operators miss. The commitment isn’t only about the vendor you award. It’s about everyone you didn’t. Take your top ten, award the best supplier on each for the next thirty days, and then tell the rest of your vendor community exactly where they lost the business and by how much. That changes the entire conversation. You’ve made the stakes real. The next round of quoting gets sharper, because everyone now knows there’s a defined award and a defined window, and they know precisely what it cost them to miss. Tell them you’re committed until a set date, and the conversation gets more honest and more efficient at the same time.
Two rules make this work. First, when you ask for that next round, require a single quote. No re-quoting if they aren’t awarded. Second, never share one vendor’s pricing with another. I know that runs against instinct. Vendors will always ask what the other guy offered so they can beat it or match it. Short term, playing that game feels like a win. Long term, it erodes credibility, it discourages honest and aggressive first quotes, and it quietly hands the advantage to whoever quotes last. Worse, “just beat this number” hides your best vendors. The ones who are naturally more efficient never have to show you how competitive they really are. Make them quote to the item, one time, on their own merits, and the real value in your vendor base shows itself.
Now, the ten items worth re-quoting look very different depending on who you are. For a single independent operator, this is a focused afternoon. For a multi-unit, multi-state group, it’s a bigger animal, made more complex by every chef de cuisine’s own read on value at each outlet, and again at the regional and corporate level. Without a real commitment to unity, and a corporate chef who’s dialed into item-level specs, comparing across locations gets hard fast.
And that’s where the real work starts, because it’s the part most people skip. Before you compare a single price across locations, check that the spec is actually the same everywhere. Same item, same pack, same grade, from every distributor that delivers it. You’d be surprised how often it isn’t, and if it isn’t, you aren’t comparing anything real. Once the spec holds, normalize your ten into one master list, and put them out as a single, consolidated quote instead of letting each location quote on its own. Then consolidate toward whoever is genuinely delivering the most value, and hold every outlet to the number you award. If a cook in one location can still buy that same item at a different price, the deal was never really locked in.
Then there’s the move almost nobody makes. If no single distributor can cover all your locations, go up a level, straight to the manufacturer. On a branded product, you can often get the manufacturer’s support on a contract directly. And once you hold that contract, you can drive that price through whatever distributors you use, in whatever state they’re in. That’s what turns a scattered, location-by-location buy into one position you actually control, and it’s the biggest reason the payoff grows with every location you add.
Because that’s the upside hiding inside all the complexity. The more locations you have, the more there is to gain from consolidating this data and realigning around your strongest suppliers. Consolidation strengthens your position at the table, and it rewards the vendors who earn it: the competitive ones offering the best value and service, the ones you want more of your business going to.
And notice what this really is. It isn’t a competence problem in your building. Your chef is running the menu. Your manager is running the shift. Nobody’s naturally set up to sit down, sort a year of spend by dollars, check specs across every distributor, and run a clean round of quotes across every location in the middle of a busy week. And it isn’t a one-time job. The value is in doing it every period, which is exactly the part that’s hardest to protect. It’s a focus problem, not a people problem. It needs a clear method everybody follows, someone who owns it, and enough visibility to see the whole picture at once. That discipline, kept every period across every location, is most of what we do with operators at ChefMod.
None of this is a secret handshake. A supplier reading this would probably nod along. Plenty of them would rather have a clean, fair award than a race to the bottom. Some will push back and argue the only way to win is to put every price on the table and let vendors fight it out. That’s a real opinion. It just isn’t ours, and after a lot of years doing this, it isn’t what we’d recommend you do either.
If you do just one thing this week, do this. Pull your spend, sort it by dollars, pick your ten, strip out the non-negotiables, and put those items out for a single, clean round of quotes with a defined award window. Then watch who steps up.
Where do you land: clean single-round awards, or full price transparency across your vendors? I know some of you run it the other way, and I’d like to hear the case for it. That’s the conversation this newsletter is for.
And if you’d rather not run it alone, that’s exactly what we do. Grab fifteen minutes with me and we’ll go through your ten together: chefmod.com/Grab15.
John
Behind the Line is for multi-unit operators who’d rather see the leak than chase the symptom. If it’s useful, pass it along to someone who’d nod along.
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Behind the Line goes out every Tuesday for multi-unit operators who would rather hold the line than explain where the money went.
Want to know what your own numbers look like? ChefMod runs procurement for multi-unit independents: the agreements, the price checks, the receiving discipline, and the weekly numbers underneath all of it.