Most suppliers already know how to grow with Sysco, US Foods, and PFG: Write the program, fund the spend, track the volume. The independent channel, while it makes up over half of the market share, creates a bigger problem. Thousands of distributors with no single way to run one growth strategy across all of them, and rarely a clean way to prove which cases were actually incremental.

Growth Agent exists to close that gap: one partner driving a unified growth strategy across the independent market, built to produce incremental cases with full visibility into what sold and what it returned. In this recap, we walk through our recent session with our supplier partners, an extension of the panel we hosted at Unipro Partners Plus a few weeks earlier. 

Here’s what we covered:

What We Hear from Suppliers

Pepper has been focused on the manufacturing side of the business for three-plus years. Three themes came back over and over:

Incrementality has to be provable

Nobody wants to pay on cases they're already selling. The question when funding growth isn't whether volume moved, it's whether the volume moved because of the program, and whether you can show that to your own leadership.

Stakeholder alignment is harder than anyone wants to admit

This isn’t being shouted; it surfaced on its own. 

The issue is that successfully moving more product involves three entities (manufacturer, distributor, and operator), each with a full org chart inside each one. 

• On the supplier side: marketing, category management, field sales, executives. 
• On the distributor side: executives, purchasing, category managers, DSRs, DSMs, marketing. 
• At the operator, it's the manager or chef placing the order. 

Having one stakeholder at each level on board doesn't produce momentum. Real growth happens when all of them are aligned on the same program, the same goal, the same plan for the year.

Test and learn comes first

Your name goes next to the investment. Before anyone commits at national scale, they need to prove the system works in a small, controlled environment.

Closer to a Growth Agency Than a Product

The framing we like to use when speaking with Suppliers is to think of Growth Agent as a process you go on with Pepper, not a product with a feature list.

We started this program with three major supplier partners about 18 months ago and are now at nine (and growing). The lesson from that expansion is that every supplier and every category is different: different products, different challenges, different go-to-market motion from marketing through the sales team. 

A custom process, built together, is the thing that works. And while we avoided this description for a long time; increasingly, it's accurate. This is a growth agency function as much as a software one.

The test-and-learn phase is designed to produce quick wins at individual distributors where there's clear white space and conversion opportunity - wins you can celebrate internally and use to earn the right to expand nationally.

Start With the Goal, Then Pull the Levers

The graphic at the top of every Growth Agent conversation is the supplier's own annual incremental growth goal. Percentage growth works, but pounds or cases works better. Once that number exists, it becomes a shared dashboard both teams open every week to see how tracking looks and adjust.

The adjustments come from a set of levers:

On the marketing side: Advertising services that keep the brand in front of operators, plus direct discounts. And when we say “rebates”, we mean these are the same incentives that used to go out on paper flyers and require an operator to mail something in for credit. Digitized, the incentive lands at the point of purchase and the money is available immediately.

On the sales side: Where the focus has been for the past 12 months, and what we’ve seen move the needle the most. And these are sales on both sides, enabling the distributor's DSRs to prioritize and sell the product, and now enabling the supplier's own street sales reps to do the same. Both sides get operator-level opportunity data, and the right people get incentivized with incremental case SPFs for a defined window. Everyone sees the same live results, and payouts land fast enough to keep reps engaged.

What a Field Sales Rep Actually Sees

Andrew broke from the deck to walk through the RSM dashboard, which an app built directly on feedback from the JBS, Aspire, and Essity field teams. Every surface in it exists because a rep asked for it.

Put the field sales rep hat on. You wake up in your territory, you sell to a dozen independents, you know there's opportunity out there. What do you do today?

• Active campaigns. Every campaign you have running, the distributor it's running with, the window it runs in, the incremental case goal attached to it, and live progress against that goal. In a test and learn, that's one or two campaigns in a territory. At national scale it's eight to ten running at once.
• Top operator opportunities, weight-ranked 100 to 0 by forecasted case volume — so the biggest targets inside that distributor are obvious.
• Live results by DSR, the items in program, and contact info for the reps you want to call and congratulate.
• DSR-level activity across every campaign. One rep has sold 61 cases and still has two hot leads open. That's a real phone call with a real ask: what do you need to close these? Samples? The broker in the room? A local program to get the volume over the line?
• Performance and leaderboards — DSR participation, how many have sold a case, percentage case lift, active operators, and how you compare to your peer RSMs. For sales managers, login frequency shows who's actually working the campaigns they've been funded for.

The bigger shift underneath the screens: the RSM's job is changing. Less driving to market for a blitz, more acting as a manager for every DSR team in the territory.

A Surface for Every Stakeholder

The RSM dashboard is one of several. There are surfaces built for DSRs, DSMs, supplier executives, and distributor executives, with each showing what that role needs to act on. More are coming for the rest of the stakeholders in the chain.

Four priorities for Q3:

1. Sharper, role-specific insights. The surfaces currently share a lot of the same information. Each one should be catered to how that stakeholder can actually affect change.
2. Easier incentive payouts. For a DSR, that means a cash-out button in their app the moment a program closes — take the family to dinner on the SPF earnings that night. That feeling is what pulls reps into the next campaign.
3. In-app communication. Phone numbers and emails are exposed today, but nobody managing the program can see whether the conversations are happening. When a campaign misses forecast, DSRs say their questions went unanswered and supplier reps say nobody called. Bringing the communication in-house gives everyone visibility into who's asking about the big opportunities and whether they're getting good answers quickly.
4. Conversion campaigns. Over 18 months, Pepper has gotten good at exposing where a brand can be converted — matching your items one-to-one against competitors, then handing RSMs, DSRs, and DSMs exactly what to convert before they walk into the operator. Distributor partners running these campaigns are opening the door to move a supplier from third position to second to primary. The early conversion-focused campaigns are performing.

Get Involved

If you want to know what this looks like for your brand specifically, Pepper will run the analysis and come back with five distributor opportunities - the accounts where there's real bang for your buck and a story you can take to your own leadership. That way the next conversation isn't high level, It's the actual number.

Reach out to us to see how much you can grow.