The blanks from topic 1 get filled by asking, and the asking is easier than people expect. Distributors are used to the question, producers are delighted by it, and the whole thing usually starts with one phone call about one product. What is not easy is doing it for everything at once, which is how this ends up abandoned — so this topic is about the three questions that work, the honest trade of buying direct, and starting small enough to finish.
❓ Three questions a distributor will answer
Your distributor is not hiding anything; they simply have never been asked, and their systems are built around price and availability. Ask about one product at a time, and ask these three.
- Where does it come from — the country, the region, and the producer if you have it? How specific the answer is tells you how long the chain is. "Spain" is a chain with several steps; "this farm, this valley" is a short one.
- Can you put it on the invoice or the delivery note? This is the question that matters, and topic 4 explains why: an origin that is not documented is an origin you cannot repeat to a customer. It also converts a phone call into something that keeps arriving every week without you asking again.
- Does it change during the year, and when? Most products switch source with the season, which is the honest answer to why the same line item behaves differently in February — and it is the link back to the calendar from the previous topic.
How long the answer takes tells you as much as the answer. A distributor who comes back in an hour has a system that knows; one who takes a week is finding out from somebody else, which means your chain has more steps in it than the invoice suggests. Neither is a scandal. Both are useful to know.
And ask in writing, so the answer arrives in writing. That is not distrust — it is the same discipline the cost control course applied to specifications, and it is what makes the answer usable six months later when somebody asks you where the beef is from.
🤝 Buying direct: the honest trade
Buying straight from a producer is the version everybody pictures, and it is genuinely good for the things it is good at. It is also more work, and the work is the part the story leaves out.
| Distributor | Direct from producer | |
| Price | Usually lower per unit | Sometimes better, sometimes not — the middle step was doing work |
| Origin | Has to be asked for | Obvious, and you can visit |
| Delivery | Frequent, reliable, one truck | Their schedule, sometimes weekly, sometimes you collect |
| Consistency | Standardised, all year | Varies with the season and the weather — which is the point |
| Admin | One invoice, one payment | One of each, per producer, per week |
That last row is the one that quietly kills direct buying in small restaurants. Six producers means six deliveries at six different times, six invoices to check and six payments to make, and it lands on the same person who is already doing the count and the rota. It is manageable for two or three items and unmanageable for twenty, which is exactly why the recommendation is to start with one.
The other honest note is about reliability. A distributor's job is that the box arrives; a producer's job is growing food, and a bad week for them is a bad week for your menu. That is survivable if the item is on the moving part of the menu from the previous topic, and painful if it is in your best-selling dish.
🎯 One product, done properly
Pick a single item and do the whole thing on it before touching anything else. The right one usually meets three conditions: it is one of your eight big items, it appears in a dish people associate with you, and it has a real alternative available near you.
Then run it end to end. Ask the current supplier the three questions. Find one or two alternatives and ask them the same. Compare on the cost control course's terms — cost per usable unit, not list price, because a producer's product often has a different yield. Taste them, blind, with the kitchen. Then price the switch in money per month, the way topic 1 did with the beef: a hundred kilos, $1.20 more per kilo, $120 a month, 0.75% of the food bill. Decide with that number in front of you, and send the affordability question to the budgeting course.
Give it a season before judging, keep the old supplier warm, and write down what changed — price, yield, waste, what the kitchen said, what guests said. That page is what makes the second product take an afternoon instead of a month, and it is the thing nobody keeps.
🌱 The relationship is the asset
The last part is the one that does not fit in a table. A producer who knows your restaurant will tell you what is coming, hold back the good stuff, warn you about a bad month and take a phone call on a Saturday. That is worth more over a decade than any single price negotiation, and it is built exactly the way the cost control course said supplier relationships are built: pay on time, order predictably, complain specifically and rarely, and do not squeeze somebody small until they resent you.
Two things make it real rather than sentimental. Visit — a farm visit is a couple of hours, it changes how the whole kitchen talks about the ingredient, and it is the only way to know whether the story you have been told is true. And commit to something: a producer can plan for a restaurant that says it will take twenty kilos a week all summer, and cannot plan for one that buys when it feels like it.
And keep the second source. A single supplier for a critical item is the same risk the kitchen course found with a single machine on the critical path: fine until the week it is not.