What Restaurants and Retailers Now Expect From Their Food & Drink Suppliers

Ask a distributor how their customers order, and most will describe a phone line, a WhatsApp thread, and an inbox that fills up overnight. Ask the person on the other end of that order — a restaurant manager, a retail buyer, someone doing inventory at 10 pm — and you'll hear a different story: they'd rather just place the order themselves, from their own device, on their own schedule.

That gap between how distributors sell and how buyers actually want to buy is no longer a niche preference. It's the direction the entire B2B market has been moving for several years, and the food and drink trade is not exempt.

The shift is already most of the market

Digital channels now account for 56% of B2B revenue, up from just 32% in 2020, and Gartner had forecast that 80% of B2B sales interactions would happen through digital channels by the end of 2025 (Ringly.io, B2B ecommerce statistics 2026). Separately, industry research finds that essentially all B2B buyers now want to self-serve at least part of their purchasing journey, and most B2B organizations already maintain some kind of ecommerce storefront or self-service ordering portal (Sana Commerce, B2B e-commerce trends for 2026).

Part of this is generational. A growing share of B2B buyers — including the people placing restaurant and retail orders — are Millennials and Gen Z who grew up ordering everything from groceries to taxis with a few taps, and they bring that expectation to work (Ringly.io).

What foodservice and retail buyers actually say they want

This isn't abstract for distributors specifically. Research from Technomic on independent restaurant purchasing found operators buying supplies online, instead of through a phone call to their broadliner, cut purchasing costs by roughly 12–13%, and that a meaningful share of independent operators — around 27% — already buy online at least once a month (Restaurant Business Online, "Distribution goes digital"). The qualities operators cited as most appealing weren't exotic: no order minimums, easy payment, a clear catalog, and transparent pricing they could check themselves instead of asking a rep to read prices over the phone.

None of that describes a generic marketplace. It describes exactly what a distributor's own ordering process could offer — if it existed online.

What buyers say they want	What phone/WhatsApp-only ordering delivers
See their own prices and catalog anytime	Prices read aloud, on request, during business hours
Order in seconds, no back-and-forth	5–10 minutes per call, plus clarifying questions
Order after hours or during a rush	Voicemail, or wait until tomorrow
Confidence the order was recorded correctly	Trust that whoever wrote it down heard it right

Digital-first doesn't mean phone-free

The mistake distributors make when they hear "buyers want digital" is assuming it means replacing the sales team with a website and hoping for the best. That's not what the data — or the buyers — are actually asking for. Buyers want the option to self-serve for the routine stuff: the same 15 products they reorder every week, the standard delivery, the late-night restock after service. They still want a real person for new accounts, special requests, and problems.

That's the pattern we see working for distributors who've made the shift:

• The routine ~70% of order volume — repeat orders, standard quantities — moves to self-service without anyone picking up a phone.
• Around 60% of total orders shift online within the first three weeks of customers getting their own ordering profile, because the switch requires no training: it's their existing catalog, at their existing prices.
• Order errors drop toward zero on the self-service share, because the buyer is selecting from their own account instead of a person transcribing a phone call.
• Self-service stays open 24/7, while the phone and WhatsApp thread stay reserved for judgment calls during business hours — the conversations that actually need a human.

This is the model B2B Daily is built around: every customer gets their own online ordering profile — their catalog, their negotiated prices, one-tap repeat ordering — while phone, WhatsApp, and email keep working exactly as they do today for the orders that need a conversation. Orders land in a dashboard your team already knows how to use, and export as a spreadsheet if that's how your systems expect them. It's a layer on top of how you already sell, not a replacement for the relationship.

The bottom line

The distributors losing customers over the next few years won't lose them on price or product quality. They'll lose them on friction — a competitor down the road who lets a restaurant manager place a 10 pm order in twenty seconds, while the incumbent supplier is closed until 9 am. The buyers have already told researchers, in survey after survey, what they want. The distributors who listen first get to keep the accounts; the ones who wait find out the hard way, one lost customer at a time.

B2B Daily gives every one of your customers their own ordering profile, while phone, WhatsApp, and email keep working exactly as they do today. Book a 30-minute call and see it with your own catalog.