How To Rise Supplies Made Promotions and Digital Ordering Work for JanSan

Five ordering channels, one team trying to keep up

To Rise Supplies is a Deer Park, NY–based distributor supplying restaurants and foodservice operators across the New York metro with a broad catalog spanning janitorial and sanitation, disposables and packaging, take-out and food-prep supplies, and pantry goods from brands like 3M and Anchor Packaging. The business was built on a simple promise: place an order by midnight, receive it the next morning. In a market where customers don't have room to warehouse their own inventory, that convenience, plus the ability to hold items and ship them only when a customer needs them, is what wins and keeps accounts. As Marketing Director Nicolás Salvo puts it, customers don't buy on price. They buy on experience.

But that experience was fragmented across too many front doors. Orders came in by e-commerce, phone, email, text, with some customers simply messaged company leadership directly. Every channel was one more place to catch an order, one more chance for something to slip. Consolidating to a single ordering channel wasn't just a software decision; it required changing how the entire customer base thought about placing an order.

There was also the timing. The team had just finished a full redesign of their existing ecommerce site. Moving to a new platform so soon felt, understandably, like throwing away hard-won work. "My first opinion was: we're not ready for this," Nicolás Salvo, director of marketing at To Rise Supplies recalls.

A segmented rollout and hands-on onboarding to bring the whole base along

Leadership made the call to modernize, and Salvo's job was to make it land. The advantage he had going in: months of groundwork teaching customers to engage through structured communication. By the end of the prior year, the team had hit their best-ever customer interaction numbers. If the base was ever going to absorb a major change, this was the moment to prove it.

Rather than a single blast announcement, the team built a segmented campaign around how each customer already ordered. Customers who lived in the ecommerce experience got a simple message: same channel, now on your phone. Customers who'd only ever called or emailed got a different, more patient message: skip the hold time and you can place your order in the app in minutes.

The launch itself was hands-on. After initially setting a target date, the team kicked off the project in May, running two working sessions a week to learn the platform alongside Pepper's team. It was, Salvo notes, a departure from past vendor experiences: "I loved the Pepper team - it was the first time working with software we had a good support team” through onboarding and implementation.

Promotions that drove adoption, surfaced hidden demand, and moved margin

The standout is what happened when To Rise ran promotions, something the platform made possible for the first time. Their business model historically doesn't display prices publicly, since pricing is personalized per customer. In-app promotions gave them a way to put a compelling, time-boxed price in front of buyers, available only through the app - turning the promo into both a revenue driver and an adoption lever. Time-boxed offers of three days to a week created urgency and moved high-margin, seasonally relevant SKUs, like disposables and paper goods tied to the World Cup.

Just as valuable as the sales lift was the visibility. Pepper's promo reporting surfaces which customers are buying a promoted item for the first time. "When I have the report of the promo campaign, the section of first customers that are buying these items — I love it," Salvo says. It points to the value of digital adoption - a longtime account discovering, sometimes after years, a product the distributor always carried but the customer could never find.

There's a persistent assumption that promotions and digital merchandising only move food and perishables like chicken, produce, and lettuce. To Rise's results say otherwise. 

In a category as traditional and price-sensitive as JanSan, the winning play wasn't discounting for its own sake; it was matching the right item to the right moment, on a platform simple enough that any buyer, including the many who don't speak English as a first language, can navigate it by picture and price.

Today roughly half the customer base is active in the app, with a clear path to migrating the rest. The team is already testing item connections  (cross-sell recommendations starting with their milk category) to surface high-margin products at the point of purchase. And with promotion data now in hand, Salvo is building the case for a vendor-funded promotions program: exclusive, brand-specific promos and broadcasts that vendors pay to run, backed by the performance data to prove they work.

"There are a lot of companies selling the same products we do. If we can be different, that's perfect - and this is how we're different."
— Nicolás Salvo, Marketing Director, To Rise Supplies