What are the Benefits of Buying Directly from Local Wholesale Food Suppliers?

How many food wholesalers from your area can you think of? We’re not asking if you’ve visited any local farm to complete a simple purchase. Commuting anywhere is a time-consuming task, and people simply lack the means and energy to question where their groceries are coming from (let alone personally seek out food producers).

But hold on! Grocery wholesalers are now widely available online, offering not only business-to-business (B2B) but also business-to-customers (B2C) services. What’s so great about that? Let’s dig in.

Wholesale vs. Retail

First off, let’s clarify the difference between a wholesale and a retail business. Generally speaking, wholesalers buy from manufacturers and further sell their products to retailers. Finally, retailers will sell these goods to consumers such as yourself. Well, at a much higher price.

Your nearest store or supermarket chain is a retailer. Putting things into perspective, the road that food takes to reach your kitchen is surprisingly slow and bumpy. But what if it didn’t have to pass through so many hands?

Actually, we have some good news! Since the beginning of the global pandemic, a surprisingly positive trend has been observed, as more and more wholesalers open their virtual doors to the public. What used to be a rarity is slowly becoming the norm: restaurants have started using online wholesale platforms to get the freshest groceries, and you can do the same.

The Benefits of Buying from Local Wholesale Food Suppliers

This model is called D2C or direct to consumer. Since the services you wish to purchase no longer require an extra mediator, the benefits are significant. This is especially true for wholesale food. Let’s look over some of the main advantages of buying directly from local suppliers.

1. 1. Significantly lower prices

      You can get your food in larger quantities but at an overall lower cost. Why is that? Before the food ends up on supermarket shelves, it’s first unloaded and placed in large storage areas. More employees organizing and moving boxes around translates to more money out of your pocket. But take retailers out of the picture, and prices no longer include what you were charged for employee wages, rent, transportation, and storage.

   2. Fewer hands moving items around

      In our recent blog on pre-cut fruit, we’ve seen that a grocery store’s produce section is usually rampant with bacteria. And it’s hard to expect hygienic heaven from a place roamed by hundreds, perhaps thousands of customers using the same shopping carts throughout a single day. Naturally, produce left out in the open will be exposed to germs and bacteria. However, when you purchase directly from local wholesale suppliers, your food is not transferred from one warehouse to another. Instead, it’s delivered directly to your doorstep. This process is straightforward, efficient, and friendlier for the product itself.

   3. Delivered and packaged by industry leaders

      Wholesalers can ensure safe shipping and better-quality oversight. If you’re buying local too, then the food’s not traveling from some far-off place. Therefore, it’s closer to produce meant for fresh markets (and you can avoid the notorious one-year-old apples). Safe deliveries also ensure fewer environmental changes that can negatively impact food quality, since refrigerated trucks maintain it at an optimal temperature. All in all, you get fresh food with longer shelf life.

   4. Quick online orders & easy tracking

      With online platforms such as DineMarket, grocery shopping is a quick, cost-effective, environmentally friendly process. You can also choose to buy in bulk, which means fewer of these tiny plastic packages already flooding ecosystems.
      Additionally, online shopping makes it easy to obtain your groceries in a time-efficient manner. And while it’s true that you must wait for them to be delivered, you’re not wasting any extra hours wandering through aisles and bumping into other customers. Also, you won’t have to fight off any unnecessary temptation, such as conveniently placed chocolate bars by the grocery store checkout.

   5. Speak directly to the source and get better information

      Lastly, wholesalers know where the food is coming from. You can’t really ask that market worker if they know details on a particular diary product or how long that beef traveled before it reached the aisle. But this type of information – and much more – is available to local food wholesalers, and you can reach out to their customer service department for anything you wish to clarify.

    

   Wrapping Up

   With the growing numbers of online platforms, wholesalers have never felt closer. Make the most of this opportunity and pick a local marketplace for your next groceries.

   Not sure which one? DineMarket has been supplying restaurants for over a decade, and we’ve recently opened our services to customers in the New York area. Our platform allows you to order directly from the finest food wholesalers, so you don’t have to struggle with any tiresome research.