Order Entry That Moves as Fast as The Reps Do

Every Rep Is Their Own Order Desk

Founded in 2009 and based in Loris, South Carolina, Carolina Food Service is the only independently owned, full-service food distributor along the Grand Strand, serving Hispanic and Latino restaurants across the Carolinas with a bilingual team that manages every customer relationship end to end. Their reps don't just take orders; they own their accounts, with every order coming in directly to them and every entry their responsibility to get into their ERP.

The formats those orders arrive in are anything but consistent. Customers send text messages, voice notes, and photos of handwritten lists. Some send one item at a time, while some consolidate several days of requests into a single message, and some even call the rep directly and rattle off what they need.

Sometimes, these orders aren’t a problem - for a rep sitting at a desk with their ERP open and the order list memorized, a typical order takes under five minutes to key in. For anyone less familiar with the system, closer to eight. 

But reps don’t stay at their desks, and it’s rarely easy to get dedicated time to key orders. Multiply that across a full route and it adds up fast, especially when a rep is already on the road between stops. And if a rep is already on the road between stops, that entry doesn't happen until they're back at a desk, creating a lag between when a customer sends an order and when it actually hits the system.

The problem compounds for reps who are also the first line of quality control. Marilin Villegas, rep at CFS, described how she’s regularly catching missing items before submitting: Calling the customer, waiting for a response, then updating the order. That back-and-forth is valuable, but it takes time, and it can’t happen when you’re out on the road.

Order Agent as the Rep's Always-On Entry Point

Two reps, Marilin and Ivan Serrato, were among the first at Carolina Food Service to fully adopt Pepper’s Order Agent and quickly became the team's fastest adapters.

Their workflow: customers text or WhatsApp their orders to the rep as they always have. The rep forwards the message (in whatever format it arrived in) to Order Agent, and Order Agent parses it and builds the order which the rep reviews, edits if needed, and submits.

The system handles more than plain text. One customer consistently sends orders one item at a time; Marilin batches the messages and forwards them together. Another sends voice notes and voicemails, she forwards those too, and Order Agent transcribes and processes them. The orders come in primarily in Spanish, which Order Agent handles without issue.

The most striking example: A customer's order written on the back of a cardboard lid from a nine-inch pan that was photographed and forwarded. Order Agent read it nearly perfectly.

Juan  put Order Agent in front of a skeptical customer directly. A restaurant manager had been frustrated by phone tag with her rep and hadn't touched the Pepper app she'd been invited to months earlier. He walked her through it on her iPad, then handed her a napkin and asked her to write down three items she knew she'd need for Monday. She photographed it, texted it to Order Agent, and watched the order populate in real time. Then she called the number and placed a second order by voice. She asked to keep both on her delivery.

"Really? You can do that now?" she said.

Order Entry That Moves as Fast as the Rep Does

For Marilin and Ivan, Order Agent turned order entry from a desk task into something that happens in the flow of the day. Orders that used to require sitting down, logging into their ERP, and manually keying every line now get handled in seconds: Forward the message, review the order, submit. For a rep who previously spent 5-8 minutes entering each order by hand, that time adds up across a full route.

The bigger shift is what reps can do with that recovered time. Marilin described being able to handle orders mid-route without stopping: "If I'm on the road because of an emergency, I can still literally work — send it in, submit it, done." The order doesn't wait until she's back at a desk. Neither does the customer.

Ivan put it in terms of the rep relationship: Order Agent handles the entry so reps can stay focused on the parts of the job that actually require them, like catching missing items, checking inventory, talking through pricing. The back-and-forth with customers doesn't go away, but it's no longer tangled up with the mechanics of getting an order into the system.

The team is still in the early stages of full adoption, with Marilin and Ivan  leading and other reps coming along behind them. But the direction is clear: every minute not spent on manual entry is a minute that can go toward selling.

Carolina Food Service is a foodservice distributor whose sales reps manage their own customer accounts and order workflows. The team uses Pepper's Order Agent integrated with their ERP.