If you didn't know, today is my birthday! I am 22. Rachael gave me a nice present this morning and they had cake and more presents for me at work! How sweet!
Work was very interesting today. When I got here I called the whole wheat pizza crust rep, Randy. It was my first time negotiating billbacks! Basically, I called him and told him what we were interested in (not overly interested, of course) and how much we would be using. Then we discussed pricing and I told him about the amazing deal that we are currently receiving for regular pizza dough. He has to get back to me with more numbers after running it past others in his company. A billback is when they give you a certain $ amount back for every box that you buy. We'd like to get "off invoice allowances" which don't require you to send in a rebate to get the money. For instance, we get $7.35 off for every box of pizza crust that we buy. Most billbacks are more like $1-2. Also, they are not "slotted" at FSA so we can dangle that in front of them a little bit. If you aren't slotted at a distribution center, then no one can buy your product! Since we are a prime vendor, we can get anything slotted that we want to buy. That saves the company a lot of money.
Today we started the salad dressing cutting. Ronda and April from Western Marketing came in to represent FSA brand and Ventura brand salad dressings. Rachael, Beth, and I took an early lunch and when we got back we found out that the reps came early and took Paul out!!! O well! They had a nice set-up (see picture) of several different dressings and carrot sticks for sampling. We had all of the food service managers come and test them out. After they left we sat down with the reps and discussed pricing. They are not willing to do much for us and seem to be an expensive alternative to our current dressings. If we don't find a deal we may have to stick with what we've been doing (dressing mixes). We have 3 more cuttings next Monday and a competetive taste test next Tuesday.
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