Resources

Micucci Wholesale Modernized a 40 Year Old Family Business - and Got Its Sundays Back

"I was talking to a few companies, and I was really thinking about the money. But that's the truth in this business: You get what you pay for." --Ethan Micucci, Micucci Wholesale

Key Outcomes

Some accounts quadrupled their weekly spend

Customers who had been buying around $500 a week are now placing $2,000 in residual weekly orders — not because they were sold harder, but because they could finally see the whole catalog.

Customers discovered products Micucci had carried all along

Before Pepper, a customer's view of the company was a hand-built quote sheet of 15 to 20 items pulled from a kitchen tour. Now reps hear "I didn't know you carried this" and pick up the incremental order.

A company with no digital presence got a front door

Micucci had no website and no ordering platform of any kind. Pepper gave the business a storefront, a branded site, and a way to look as legitimate to a new operator as any national competitor.

Sunday order entry went from six hours to twenty minutes

Ethan used to spend five to six hours every Sunday taking orders by phone and text so his team could pick and load Monday morning. Now his customers place those orders themselves in the app, and Sunday is a twenty-minute check.

See Their Stories

Meet the team

Written By

Pepper Team

Published

August 19, 2026

Problem

A successful company with no way to show customers what it sold

Micucci Wholesale is a family-owned distributor in Portland, Maine, supplying cheese and Italian specialty products to restaurants and pizzerias across the region. The company has been in business for decades, runs a team of about a dozen, and services parts of its territory with multiple deliveries a day.

What it didn't have was any way for a customer to see what was in the warehouse. Ordering happened one of two ways: Either a rep called an account and asked what they needed that week, or the account sent a text. Product presentation was a quote sheet - 15 or 20 items a rep picked by hand after a kitchen tour, based on what they guessed the operator would buy. There was no website, no ordering platform, and no way for a customer to find a product on their own.

That ceiling capped growth in two directions at once. Every account was limited to the assortment a rep had time to walk them through, and every order had to pass through a person to exist at all. As Ethan Micucci, sales at Micucci Wholesale puts it: "We didn’t have a great way to present products to customers. We had no other platform for ordering."

The operational cost landed even on the weekend. Reps spent five to six hours every Sunday absorbing orders by phone and text so the warehouse had something to pick and load Monday morning, time the business was spending on transcription rather than on selling or opening new accounts.

Micucci had already tried to fix this. The company signed with another eCommerce vendor in June on a promised August launch, and told roughly 15 customers an app was on the way. By October, five months in, nothing had gone live. The failed implementation cost the business more than a quarter of momentum in the selling season; it cost credibility with the exact accounts it was meant to serve.

"We're not just distributing food. We're distributing promises, energy, money. I had told 15 or so customers the app was on its way — and then I had to tell them it wasn’t coming."

Solution

Answering the objections instead of talking past them

With no platform available and customers waiting, Ethan went back to the market.

Ethan called Chase Daniel, his Pepper rep, expecting the usual pitch. What he got was a callback in five minutes, an hour of being heard out, and then an email that itemized every objection he'd raised with a specific answer under each one. While he'd worked with Pepper briefly years earlier, he came in skeptical of the process.

“We understand that every distributor is different and I could tell Ethan had a specific vision for how he wanted his platform to look and behave” says Chase Daniel, sales manager at Pepper. “The devil is always in the details, and we knew we had to spend a lot of time upfront to understand those intricacies in order to deliver on them.”

Micucci deployed Pepper Storefront. The company's full assortment went online as a browsable catalog with product photos, replacing the hand-built quote sheet and accounts got an ordering app they could use on their own schedule, without calling or texting a rep. Pepper also built the company its first website.

Implementation ran through a consistent account team, with no handoff gap between them. For a company that had just lost time to a project that missed its launch date, that mattered as much as the product.

"Continuity. That's hard in a company. If I promise a pizza place the best cheese and the best price, and then my driver shows up three hours late with a bad attitude — now there's an incongruency between what I sold and what got delivered. That hasn't happened with Pepper."

Results

Baskets up, Sundays back, and capacity to go get more customers

The catalog did what the quote sheet never could. With products, photos, and full assortment in front of the operator, accounts started ordering items they didn't know Micucci stocked, with several going from roughly $500 a week to $2,000.

The time savings compound in the same direction. Every customer who moves to the app is a customer Ethan isn't manually taking an order from on a Sunday afternoon, which is capacity he redirects at new business. "Every time a customer goes on the app” Ethan says, “I'm like, ‘yes!’ Because now it frees up allocated energy and time on my end, so I can go get a new customer."

The business is also visible in a way it wasn't before. A distributor with no website now has one, plus a storefront that makes the company look like the modern operation Ethan is trying to build it into.

Micucci is currently working through its busiest stretch of the year and plans to expand in the fall payments through Finance Hub is the next conversation, with marketing and promotions behind it. As Ethan puts it: "My customers who have opted to use the app are really enjoying it. That's all we can ask for."

"A customer referred to me the other day as his business partner, and I thought that was a really interesting way to put it. In a way, that's how I feel about Pepper. If I'm selling more, more people are using Pepper — that helps both of us. There's a mutuality here."

— Ethan, Micucci Wholesale