Woody’s Free Range joined Upstock when they started increasing sales into Foodstuffs. Owner Daniel Todd has been very happy with how that's worked out.
"As we roll out into more and more Foodstuffs stores it'd just be impossible without Upstock. It’s a game-changer."
Automating their supermarket orders with Upstock worked its magic, but more magic was to come. They realised customers were buying a wider range of products now that they could see everything that was on offer.
Daniel says the free-range meat company has an extensive range, including 93 product lines from bacon and sausages to pastrami. But their old wholesale product list had no pictures or details, and just wasn’t cutting it.
“We used to send somebody our old price list every couple of months. It was not a good way to let them understand the full range of products, because they'd spend five minutes looking at it, pick a few products, then never think about it again.”
Daniel now uses Upstock to communicate with their wholesale customers. He says it allows him to give his customers a ‘live’ real-time understanding of all the products they offer.
“Upstock lets our customers refer back to the full product list, pick from those products, try different ones one week, and move back to the existing products the next week. It helps us show off everything we’ve made.”
Daniel noticed customers are now exploring the full range.
“We're finding quite regularly they'll try a new product. And up to this point, I have not seen any of those products drop off. Maybe they started ordering bacon and sausages, then they think, ‘Well, let's try the ham’ and the ham continues. And then they think ‘Well let's try the pastrami or the charcuterie’ and that continues.”
Now that customers can see the full range they are spending more time getting to know Woody’s products and placing bigger orders.
“We've seen an increase in order value because it’s easy to see everything on offer. We have 10 different flavours of sausages, and it's very difficult for our retailers to know all of them. With Upstock, when they go to order the same sausages they always buy, they also see the Golden Red Pepper sausages and think, ‘Oh, maybe we should try that’. It's very, very good at encouraging order value increases.”
More from our chat with Daniel:
What sets your business apart from other ethical meat companies?
It all comes down to the fact that it's free-range, because free-range pork is grown slower, the animals can move around considerably more, which produces better quality meat. We also realise the only way a smaller business like ours can run is to make value-added products from everything we do. So we only process whole animals. We've spent the last five years working out how we can turn it into bacon and ham and charcuterie and salami and sausages and pastrami and the list goes on and on.
How has Upstock helped you to automate your systems?
Before Upstock we always insisted that our customers only use email for ordering. Because of my background in consumer electronics, I'm quite well-structured. And so emails always went to the right folders and were always transcribed to orders for the butchery to work off. But it was still time-consuming. The difference with Upstock is that it produces the invoice for me as well. And so now we're going from what used to be a manual system of receiving an email writing onto a sheet, the butchers would confirm the sheet check and then give it back to us. We would then raise an invoice and it would produce a packing slip. So Upstock basically does the packing slip and the invoice for us. So it streamlines the whole process.
How did Upstock help as you increased sales into Foodstuffs?
We were just printing off the orders from the Foodstuffs Exchange system, we then had to manually type those into Xero to produce the packing slips and then the invoices. It was just very onerous. I mean, it was quite scary, to be honest. Because as we roll out into more and more Foodstuffs stores it'd just be impossible without Upstock. It’s a game-changer.
See all the benefits of Upstock for fresh meat suppliers & butchers
Order wholesale today from Woody's Free Range
