Best-in-industry Supplier Contracts

The core value of Food Buyers Network™ is our ability to extend thousands of manufacturer and supplier contracts to our members.  These contracts have been negotiated, re-negotiated, and then negotiated again year after year for the past six years based on a combined purchasing power of over 3 BILLION!  The end result is thousands of contracts that represent the very best available.  In short, independent and regional operators are now able to get the pricing that once belonged only to the large, national restaurant corporations.  One of the many benefits of using Food Buyers Network™ as your procurement strategy is our constant vigilance with respect to our contracts to ensure that month after month the contracts in place represent the best available in the industry, taking into consideration market fluctuations.  In other words, using Food Buyers Network™ is like having a team of hundreds of contract managers in your business that are constantly negotiating contracts, and then monitoring their value in changing markets. 

Regional Supplier Programs

In addition to national manufacturer programs, Food Buyers Network™ offers members access to thousands of regional supplier programs.  No matter where your business is, Food Buyers Network™ has incredible programs with regional meat, seafood and produce suppliers.  This means our members are able to get best-in-industry pricing on nationally branded products through broadline distribution, as well as top-quality meats, seafood and produce from your local suppliers, but at nationally contracted prices.

"MyFBN"™ Technology to Provide Spend Visibility, Analysis & Management Capability

While education and coaching is the foundation of all Food Buyers Network™ programs, utilization of technology is the vehicle that helps deliver the programs in an efficient, scalable and valuable manner.  The Food Buyers Network™ technology team has developed best-in-industry spend management software that is available to all Food Buyers Network™ members as a free online resource.  This technology provides members with incredible visibility into their purchases.  Users can browse specific invoices, search for specific products or check which prices have fluctuated, and these are only a few of the resources available through this technology.  The backbone of the program is a descending dollar report that lists all products purchased, as well as recommendations for how to purchase more efficiently by taking advantage of specific Food Buyers Network™ contracted products.  Other functionality of the program allows users to view spend by product category, as a percentage of either total spend or unit revenue, as well as track distributor invoices and drop sizes.

Educational & Coaching Services

All Food Buyers Network™ programs are built on a foundation of education and coaching.  Along these lines, the entire Food Buyers Network expertise team is dedicated to providing individualized service to our members to help them better develop their internal cost control and procurement systems.  Further, Food Buyers Network™ continuously posts blog articles and holds live webinars on topics such as inventory best practices, key item analysis, theft prevention, order guide development, menu engineering, basic procurement strategy, and many more!  Whether you are an operator that requires only limited coaching services, or one that wants all the assistance they can get--Food Buyers Network™ is committed to delivering these services as part of the membership plan with no additional incremental fees.

Online Order Guide Portal

Our online order guide portal enables our members to setup all of their vendors and suppliers in a single online ordering portal that allows users to place orders from pre-established order guides and then automatically transmit these orders to the vendors.  Not only does this system create an easy way of placing all orders and creating historical records of orders, but it also enables operators to lock down the order guide that they wish to be used by those placing the orders.  This system will then track to ensure that the exact product ordered through the system is the exact product received in the unit, without any mis-pulls, distributor substitutions or unit employees ordering the incorrect product.

An "out-sourced" Procurement Strategy

Food Buyers Network™ believes in being a partner to procurement employees by being a resource they can utilize to execute their procurement function.  Further, many operators and procurement managers find that they are able to reduce the company overhead for their current procurement solutions.  By leveraging our host of services, we enable procurement managers to operate more efficiently at a reduced cost to the operator.

Supplier Contract Compliance & Price Audit

In addition to negotiating best-in-industry contracts, the Food Buyers Network™ Watch Dog Contract Compliance™ system tracks each line-item of each supplier invoice delivered to our members to ensure the invoiced cost for each product is in line with our contracts.  This technology guarantees that every valuable penny available flows directly down to the bottom line.

QA Programs

Food Buyers Network™ believes that price negotiation is only a small part of delivering a valuable procurement strategy.  Just as important as pricing, is quality and safety assurance. Because of this, all of our contracted products go through continuous and routine Quality Assurance(QA) monitoring to ensure that product consistency is being properly maintained on all contracted products.  Again, using Food Buyers Network™ procurement solutions is like having hundreds of employees that are dedicated to testing, cutting and sampling all contracted products to ensure their quality and consistency is being maintained before the products ever reach your back door.

Supplier Safety Audits & Product Traceability

In today's environment of increasing food safety concerns, Food Buyers Network™ is committed to ensuring that all of our contracted products meet the highest safety standards.  This means that all suppliers must meet stringent requirements before they are allowed to include any of their products in our program.  Further, all suppliers in our program undergo annual safety and sanitation inspections to ensure that the highest industry standards are being met from the farm to the plant to the delivery truck.  As an added line of protection, all products offered through Food Buyers Network™ are indemnified back through the supplier as an added line of protection for our members, and if there should ever be a recall or a health alert, our system can identify which members purchased the affected product so that a notification can be promptly sent.  Not only do our members get great prices on great products, but they also get the peace of mind knowing that teams of people are routinely inspecting processing procedures to ensure the food that you serve your customers is the freshest and safest in the market. 

Staying Ahead of the Curve on New Offerings

In our ever-changing industry, new products are constantly emerging.  Because of the breadth of products that we have in our network and our thousands of supplier relationships, Food Buyers Network™ is the first to know about new products--usually before they are even available to the general public.  Based on this, Account Managers that work directly for our members are able to take this knowledge and inform operators about new products based on our understanding of your operation and which products may be of interest.