How “Joined Up” Are the Wholesalers that Have Diversified into Direct To Consumer (DTC)?

Brakes, Bidfood, JJ Foodservice, Savona Foodservice and Creed Foodservice as well as other major wholesalers in the UK, have begun selling direct to consumers for the first time as they continue to respond to the coronavirus crisis.

We thought we would check them out in order to assess whther we should add any wholesalers to our SmartList App.

Brakes

Brakes press relaease says “Brakes’ new Food Shop venture went live this week at its Reading, Portbury and Warrington depots. Shoppers can browse the website, call through orders from 9am to 2pm, and collect from the depot the following day.”

So we went to their site to see how it works in more detail. There is no mention on their homepage of the new service, so we went to the FAQ section.

https://www.brake.co.uk/frequently-asked-questions

Several foodservice wholesalers have set up similar Direct To Consumer (DTC) ventures in the past two weeks, offering either collection or delivery services. We decided to test these as well:

Bidfood

Their home page carousel tells you to go here – https://www.bidfood.co.uk/become-a-customer/

I am based in Hampshire. I’ll tell you if there are any deliveries to my neck of the woods in 48 hours..

JJ Foodservice

The image in the carousel links to –

JJ Introduces Next-Day HOME Delivery Service

I did a grocery shop, which was £97 and found JJ will deliver to Hampshire (about 60 miles from their main depot)

Savona Foodservice

The only information on https://www.savona.co.uk/ was a message saying they were open to the public

But, unfortunately that is were the automation ends. You then have to ring the depot to se up an account – not a good sign for the actual website. If anyone else has used their service please tell us what it is like.