"Instead of hiring a sales rep, I hired Pepper" How Calahoo Meats is taking shelf space back from The Big Three

Competing With Deep Pockets on an Archaic System

Calahoo Meats, a Meat distributor servicing the Alberta market, wasn't shopping for a growth platform, because they were convinced it didn’t exist. They'd looked before and never found anything built for foodservice, while their competitors on the street were investing in mobile solutions with deep pockets a family-owned operation can't match dollar for dollar.

The bigger constraint was their own system, which Justine Berube, Operations Manager,describes as "archaic, to be kind." Customers ordered off a printed sheet, drivers had no product knowledge in their pocket, and most customers never saw the full catalog. Calahoo Meats needed a modern ordering experience to compete, plus a back end that let them pull vendor marketing dollars in their favor instead of ceding them to the big guys.

So when Pepper first reached out, Calahoo Meats was skeptical. "It literally seemed way too good to be true," Justine says. Several members of their independent buying group assumed the outreach couldn't be real, until one of the smaller distributors in the group tried it and confirmed that not only was it true, Pepper was a legitimate growth option for a meat distributor like theirs.. 

With an aging operating system and limited opportunities to hit their growth targets, Calahoo Meats took the plunge with Pepper.

Instead of a new rep, Hire Pepper

Calahoo Meats justified the investment by reframing it - Rather than rehire when an outside rep retires, they'd let Pepper take over that role. "It's essentially going to take his place," Justine says, "and it's been working." The app handles the routine "do you carry this?" and "what does this look like?" questions, freeing the team to prospect, build relationships, and upsell instead of taking orders. And it has delivered: "Everything that's been promised has been delivered," Justine says, "and that's a pretty big plus."

The harder part was the back end, and it's where Pepper's approach stood out. Calahoo Meats's ERP was the bottleneck in getting live. Typically, the integration should have taken a few weeks; instead, most of it was spent waiting on the ERP provider to hand over the data Pepper's team needed to build the catalog, pricing, and customer records. Rather than let that stall the project, Pepper worked around the constraints as they came up, finding solutions where the ERP threw up walls and keeping the migration moving on the pieces they could control.

That responsiveness carried into how the two systems talk to each other day to day. Orders placed through Pepper flow back into Calahoo Meats's ERP for review and release, and the same sync picks up changes on the ERP side, so the team isn't double-entering or reconciling two sources of truth. For a distributor whose previous setup was, in Justine's words, "archaic to be kind," having a modern front end that actually integrates with the system of record was a meaningful shift.

Customers Buying What They Never Knew Was There

The moment Calahoo Meats saw Pepper working was in the order summaries. Anything a customer adds that isn't on their regular order guide gets flagged in orange: a product they've never bought before, often something they didn't even know Calahoo Meats carried.

"It's the most addicting thing," Justine says. "We get to see Pepper working."

It adds up. The off-order-guide volume now represents a meaningful, recurring lift in weekly sales, and Calahoo Meats hasn't even moved all its customers onto Pepper yet. By their own math, that incremental volume alone delivers a 3–6x return on what they pay for the platform, before promotions enter the picture.

The mix is telling. It's not exotic SKUs, but the everyday items customers didn't know to ask for: takeaway containers, garbage bags. "Stuff we're like, why aren't they buying that from us?" Under the old paper guide, a customer only learned Calahoo Meats carried garbage bags by calling to ask or having a rep happen to notice. Now the whole catalog is in their hand, and that volume is coming back from Sysco and GFS: one independent winning share from the big broadliners.

Turning drivers into the face of the company

Calahoo Meats's drivers run set routes for set customers, so the same customer sees the same driver every week. That consistency makes them the face of the company, and Pepper turns the relationship into a selling tool. In the kitchen, a driver can now:

• Answer on the spot. No more "call the office tomorrow morning" after hours. The answer's in the app.
• Quote a competitor's invoice instantly. With Price Quotes a driver can snap a photo of a competitor’s invoice, get a comparison on the spot, and offer to add the item to next week's order then and there.
• Fix mistakes on the floor. Wrong cup size delivered? The driver pulls up the catalog and sorts it out instead of phoning it in.

For a large catalog no one could memorize, that's the difference between a delivery and a sale. It also brings drivers into the sales side, where they carry the knowledge and feel like part of the team. And it compounds: once a customer orders through the app a couple of times, they're hooked.

The other shift is visibility. After 22 years, the reporting side is what Justine keeps coming back to: promotions that were once a black box now show their performance in real time. "This is the first time I even feel like I have a good grasp on what we have," she says. "So definitely don't ever get rid of that orange flag."

Increasing Adoption

Calahoo Meats is rolling out deliberately, customer by customer, with a clear roadmap of features it plans to turn on next:

• Multilingual ordering. The app runs in whatever language it's downloaded in. Calahoo Meats plans to switch this on across its diverse base: a new sales rep from Ukraine already sources items in Ukrainian, and longtime Cantonese-speaking customers will soon order with ease in their own language. Voice-to-order is on the roadmap after that.
• Payments consolidation. Between the point machine, Visa, and their Converge system, Calahoo Meats pays several vendors to move money today. As mobile deposit and card terminals roll out in Canada, the plan is to bring that into one platform.
• In-Depth product recommendations. Calahoo Meats is beginning to use Pepper's new bulk CSV upload for similar and recommended items, mapping high-margin add-ons to top sellers so the customer buying fries always sees the canola oil and the takeout container.