Top Tips to Getting Organic into Foodservice

By Lew DelFierro, David Andrasko and Sarah Cody

Consumers love to eat out. For every dollar that U.S .consumers spend on retail food that they prepare at home, they spend another dollar to eat in service focused restaurants, delis, fast food chains and cafeterias. Foodservice is a $400 billion industry and organic is slowly but steadily gaining a foothold in this lucrative marketplace.

So, you’ve made a great organic product, how do you sell it into the foodservice market? As the leading food and facilities management services company in North America serving more than 6,000 colleges and universities, schools, corporations, health care facilities, senior living facilities, and military and remote sites, Sodexho USA serves millions of customers every day who eat at cafeterias and restaurants across the country. As eating out becomes a permanent part of their healthy lifestyle, customers are making greater demands for healthy nutritious foods that are good for them and good for the environment, and Sodexho has responded by adding a growing number of certified organic food products, including produce, cheese, egg products, and tofu to its offering. Here, we’ll offer some top tips to food manufacturers who want to supply organic product into the foodservice sector.

Breaking into the FoodService Market
As an organic product producer or processor looking to grow your business, now is a great time to take advantage of new opportunities to get your product a place setting at the foodservice end of the supply chain channel, but you have to refocus your product and marketing strategies to meet the needs of foodservice.

Sodexho’s interest in organics ranges from procuring certified organic raw materials and ingredients from growers and suppliers for use by our professional chefs and food preparation staffs, to working closely with vendors that provide ready-to-use and grab-and-go products that have been made with organic ingredients. We work with these vendors either directly or through distributors to determine what products will best meet our customers’ needs.

Organic raw materials, and often locally grown products, go beyond produce in Sodexho’s foodservice operations. For instance, at some locations we work with grain cooperatives to bring in specified grains and flour to make all of our baked goods, and we also work with local meat processors to meet our protein needs. Organic coffee is an extremely popular product offering for Sodexho, particularly on college campuses, where students have made a point of educating themselves on the environmental benefits of various types of coffee such as organic, shade grown and Fair Trade, and we look toward and work closely with our various coffee vendors to provide these.

The demand for organic ingredients and finished products in food service operations will continue to increase offering savvy processors a chance to get established as a key provider of products to this billion dollar industry. But to do that you have to do more than make a great product. The processors who enjoy the most success are those who can best communicate the benefits of their products to key decision makers.

To find your competitive edge and win the much sought after food service contracts, follow these five tips:

1. Help Foodservice Operators Understand Organic. When we look to source an organic product, we need to be able to understand what our customers will be getting, so we need to become familiar with the companies that produce or manufacture the products we buy. This helps us both fulfill each others’ needs, and ultimately, helps bring organic products to the tables of our customers.

We want to be able to tell our customers the story of the processors whose organic products we purchase. We encourage potential organic processors to provide this information about themselves on their product labels, and we welcome any additional educational brochures or information.

We work through many avenues to develop this understanding. Sometimes we work directly with farmers or processors; sometimes through our distributors including United Natural Foods, Inc. among others, and sometimes through other third party organizations such as Food Alliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating market rewards for sustainable agriculture, and which also has specific certification standards. Through these relationships, we work to bring products in that we can use in our foodservice operations.

The processors that can clearly and effectively communicate the story and benefits surrounding their products bring greater marketability to the table.

2. Customer Information is Accessible. When we offer organic products we want our customers to know that it’s available, and this means they need to see that it’s organic. Products should have the organic certified “stamp of approval” from a legitimate third party organic certification organization. The product should also display its source. This goes back to the desire to know the farms or ranches that the product comes from. This gives the processors another powerful way to market themselves and share their story with customers.

We want customers to have confidence that the products they buy are from sources that also adhere to the values of keeping the environment healthy. This means that product packaging should reflect the same standards used in creating an organic product. Serving an organic fruit arrangement on a polystyrene dish might not convey the right message to a customer looking for “greener” options. So we also want to see our organic products arriving in environmentally friendly and/or recyclable packaging.

3. More on Packaging for Foodservice Use. While retailers sell directly to consumers one at a time, and packaging is tailored to individual purchasers, it is significantly different in our foodservice operations. We are catering to large numbers of customers at the same time, preparing foods to order or catering to the masses in our dining facilities. Therefore, we need our products to come in bulk-size packages. It would not do to have our chefs opening individually packaged slices of cheese when trying to prepare sandwiches at our deli stations during the busy lunch hour. But this is something that we can work on with processors—to make more bulk packaged goods available. Understanding this need and having it met will enable us to make more sandwiches, meaning processors will be able to sell more product.

Indeed, there are many similar small, but significant differences in the ways food processors can produce and package their products to make them more attractive to a foodservice distribution operation. Flexibility and convenience is everything. For example, when our operators are serving cheese at their salad bars, using it on pizzas and pastas and serving it in soups all at the same time, efficiency is enhanced if they receive the cheese pre-shredded. To have to prepare the cheese upon receiving it from the processors or distributors would probably lead to using less of it as ingredients due to the time intensiveness of this task. By having options of receiving the cheese in the most usable for multiple tasks, food operators are able to use the ingredient for many different things and are likely to purchase more.

Other packaging necessities include those that make the products suitable for storing. As a foodservice operation, we store bulk foods in walk-in refrigerators and freezers, so packaging has to be stackable and re-sealable. We communicate these needs to both our distributors and farmers for the mutually beneficial goal of being able to pass along more products to our customers.

4. Food Safety. There are many other extremely important considerations when a foodservice organization is in the process of deciding to “go organic.” Whether organically or conventionally produced and processed, all products must adhere to applicable food safety regulatory mandates, industry recognized food safety standards and the buyer’s in-house food safety specifications. For Sodexho and many of your downstream customers it is imperative that we know our vendors are following Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP), microbiological, chemical or physical testing protocols (with certificates of analysis [COAs] upon delivery) and any other food safety best practices necessary to achieve the highest level of confidence that products are not only of the highest quality but are safe for consumption. This means that your company—and the foodservice buyer—will need to ensure that documentation activities include a traceability element and the recordkeeping is detailed and easily accessed.

5. Distribution Method. Another crucial detail is how the product is distributed to us. Because we have thousands of different client locations, we have to adhere to many different product receiving guidelines. For example, some of our clients have limitations on which and how many different deliverers can enter certain locations. We try to make the delivery process as seamless and unobtrusive as possible. This means limiting the number of trucks at our docking stations. It helps to have a small number of distributors that come at certain times of day to help make the delivery process smooth and efficient. They consolidate our products for us, limiting the time we’re spending on the docks.

Since many of Sodexho’s units use not only organic, but also locally grown products, it is important for us to know what’s available during any given season. Many of our chefs prepare their menus based on the seasonal availability of certain ingredients, particularly fruit, which is an organic category in high demand. Having access to the freshest fruits, vegetables and other ingredients on an ongoing basis will keep our chefs coming back for more of your organic product.

Partners in Organic Supply
The most effective way of making sure that your potential foodservice customer becomes a contracted customer is to foster open and continuous communication about organic products that are available to us, which means communication among all links in the supply chain including between foodservice units and farmers/processors, foodservice establishments and distributors, and distributors and farmers/processors. Building these relationships and keeping them strong is and will continue to be important in helping bring organics to the foodservice table. We see the demand, and the interest is only rising. Ultimately, we are encouraged by organic producers and processors who want to help those of us at the foodservice link of the supply chain to provide the best products available to our customers.

David Andrasko is the regional operations support manager, Lew DelFierro is the district manager and Sarah Cody is the senior manager for Sodexho, Sodexho, Inc. a leading provider of food and facilities management services based in Gaithersburg, MD, that offers clients a range of organic and locally grown products, including organic produce, cheeses, whole eggs, oils, spices, flour, granola, tofu, soy milk and other popular ingredients and special labeling of all organic, hormone-free, free-range, and GMO free foods. To reach them, contact Sarah Cody at Sarah.cody@sodexhousa.com.