"We made the commitment, so we held": How Sanwa Reached 98% App Adoption

A Phone-First Sales Floor and a Catalog Customers Couldn't See

Sanwa Food Group is a family-owned distributor that has been part of Florida's food economy for more than forty years. The sales floor ran on habits built over decades - half the team had been there 20-plus years, taking orders by phone and keying them in by hand against cutoffs that ran as late as 11pm. There was rarely time to do anything but capture the order and move to the next call. As sales manager Pornampa Thambundit put it, “The reps were so busy they did not even have time to say ‘hi’ to customers”.

That speed came at a cost: Most customers only ever saw the slice of the catalog they already bought. An account buying produce would never have the opportunity to learn that Sanwa also carried proteins, dry goods, and janitorial supplies (which are higher margin items as well). 

And the reps themselves were wary of change, and many assumed an ordering app was there to take their place, not to help them. Sales reps feared the app would replace their jobs, customers didn't trust digital ordering over the phone, and language barriers made onboarding harder. 

Leadership faced a real question: do you enforce the change and lose some customers, or compromise and stay stuck?

‍

The Commitment: Incentivizing Reps and Going All-In on Adoption

Sanwa made a deliberate choice. They would commit fully to the app, even if it meant losing customers who refused to change. They set a clear 60-day transition window with repeated messaging on every single channel. "We made a commitment," Keith Sorel, Director of Sales, says, "Let's hold. And we held." 

But the real strategy wasn't about forcing compliance. It was about removing every barrier to success:

1. Reassure (and incentivize) the sales team

Reps learned the app wasn't a tool to eliminate their jobs, it was freedom from order-taking. Sanwa tied bonuses to adoption rate, hitting an 80% target across the organization. When the team hit it, they earned the highest bonus payout in company history. The message was clear: we're investing in your success.

2. Build adoption into daily workflows

Before introducing customers to the app, Sanwa reps built customized order guides for each account. That meant organizing their SKUs into intuitive categories (produce, proteins, dry goods, janitorial products). They'd visit customers, walk through the app together, sometimes place the first two orders side-by-side. For restaurants with language barriers, Sanwa tapped into the customer's own family ("Can your younger relative help your parents navigate this?").

3. Make customer service the differentiator

While competitors offered apps, Sanwa kept a live team on the phones until well past the cutoff time. When a customer called late with an order they didn't want to place in the app, Sanwa would talk them through it live. Some hung up and left, but most discovered it wasn't so hard and stuck around.

4. Enable the sales conversation

With order-taking off their plate, reps had time to actually sell. They began discovering that customers didn't know Sanwa's full product lines, and many had never realized the distributor offered dry goods, proteins, or janitorial products alongside produce. The app's built-in promotions and product discovery became a real revenue lever.

98% Adoption, Bigger Orders, and Reps Back in Front of Customers

The commitment paid off across every measure Sanwa tracks, and tracking is the point. "Everything we do has to be measurable," Keith says. In fact, their primary market hit 98% adoption after the first two quarters of effort. And the results are compounding:

Customers Buying What They Never Knew Was There

With the full catalog in hand, customers started ordering beyond their usual list. Non-order-guide items now make up 3 to 4% of orders, a high share for produce, and average order size is up 15.5% since the start of last year. Weekly promotions and new items keep surfacing products customers did not know Sanwa carried. When the team listed Thai eggplant for the first time, the calls came in fast: "you guys offer that? I didn't know." Dry goods, long flat, ticked up 4 to 5%. Higher volume also feeds back into purchasing, where Sanwa can negotiate better pricing on tonnage as demand for an item grows.

Reps Back in the Kitchen, Not on the Phone

Freed from order taking, reps spend their time where it compounds. Sanwa now splits rep time roughly evenly between growing existing accounts and prospecting new ones, and new-location targets are up. The relationship shows it: On a recent ride-along, a customer greeted a rep she rarely saw in person: "I haven't seen you in the longest time! It's so nice to see you." The service that set Sanwa apart held steady through the transition. In a survey across 53 stores, customer service scored high on nearly every question. "I will put our customer service against any other company out there," Keith says.

When the Sales Team Believed, So Did Customers

The boldest move was financial. For the quarter, Sanwa tied the bonus almost entirely to hitting the adoption target. "Money is the motivator," Keith says, and the team responded by getting fully behind the app. They hit the number, and the payout that followed, the first time the company had ever paid the bonus out in full, was a signal of how completely the sales floor had committed. That buy-in is what made everything else possible. Reps who believe in the app are the ones who get customers onto it, and once they were invested, the adoption, the larger orders, and the freed-up selling time followed.

The Bigger Picture

Sanwa is not done. It is exploring Pepper's new item-name translation so customers can browse the catalog in their own language, and Payments is on the table as the business moves to a new ERP. But the foundation is set: a sales team that believes in the app, a customer base that lives in it, and numbers that prove the bet was worth making.

‍