A B2B & B2C Platform Built for Food and Beverage Wholesalers

Selldi is an all-in-one commerce platform for food and beverage wholesalers. It runs a B2B store with per-customer pricing, credit terms, standing and recurring orders, quick reorder lists and RFQ, plus a B2C store, a sales-rep CRM, a channel hub and an AI Email Reader that turns emailed and PDF orders into ERP entries. It handles case packs, batch numbers and expiry-driven ordering (FEFO), multi-currency and multi-language cross-border EU trade, and connects to any ERP via API. It does not manage physical cold-chain logistics, and it is a poor fit for a wholesaler with a single buyer and no repeat orders.

It is 6:40 on a Tuesday morning and the head chef at a mid-sized bistro group is doing the one bit of admin she actually tolerates: the standing order. She opens her supplier's portal on her phone while the espresso machine warms up, taps into last week's list, bumps oat milk from four cases to six because a new drink is selling, drops the imported anchovies she over-ordered, and confirms. The whole thing takes ninety seconds. She does not call anyone or send an email that someone at the wholesaler has to retype. By the time her kitchen porter arrives, the order is already sitting in the distributor's ERP with her negotiated prices, her payment terms and her Thursday delivery slot attached.

That ninety-second reorder is the whole game in food and beverage wholesale. Your customers are restaurants, cafés, hotels, canteens and shops. They order the same things, again and again, under time pressure, and they switch suppliers the moment ordering becomes friction. This article walks through what a platform actually has to do to make that morning routine effortless, and, just as importantly, where the software stops and your warehouse and trucks take over.

The reorder has to be faster than a phone call

In food service, the buyer is not browsing. They know what they want; they just need to reproduce last week with small tweaks. Selldi is built around that. Each customer gets quick order lists, reorder-from-history, and standing orders that repeat on a schedule you agree together, weekly, twice-weekly, or whatever the account runs on. The buyer edits quantities, confirms, and it lands. No catalogue safari, no minimum-order guessing, no waiting for someone to pick up the phone.

Recurring orders matter more here than in almost any other trade, because demand is rhythmic. A hotel needs the same breakfast staples every day, a bar restocks the same draught and spirits every week, a bakery buys flour and butter on a cycle. When the platform remembers the rhythm, your customer stops thinking about ordering, which is exactly when they stop shopping around.

Every customer sees their own price

No two accounts in food and drink pay the same. A national restaurant group negotiates hard, a corner shop pays list, a wholesale-to-wholesale buyer gets a stepped rate by volume. Selldi holds per-customer and per-group pricing, so when the bistro chef logs in she sees her prices, not a public sheet, and never a competitor's terms. Case-pack and unit logic sits underneath this: you sell a case of twenty-four, a shrink of six, or a single, and the platform keeps the pack sizes, the price per unit and the minimums straight so nobody orders a pallet when they meant a box.

Credit terms are part of the same picture. Most food-service accounts buy on terms, not card up front. The platform carries each customer's credit arrangement so the right buyers can check out on account without a manual approval loop every single order, while cash-only accounts stay cash-only. For larger or irregular purchases, a bulk banquet order, a seasonal one-off, buyers can raise an RFQ and get a quote back inside the same system rather than in a lost email thread.

Batch numbers and expiry dates are not optional

This is where food wholesale stops looking like general distribution. You are not shipping bolts; you are shipping goods that expire, and traceability is a legal and commercial requirement. Selldi tracks batch and lot numbers and expiry dates against stock, which supports FEFO, first-expired-first-out, so the case that expires soonest is the case that ships first. When a supplier issues a recall, you need to answer "which customers received lot X" in minutes, not days, and batch-level records are what make that answer possible.

FEFO also protects your margin. Ambient and chilled stock with a near date is money that walks out the door if it sits. Surfacing short-dated batches to the right buyers, and letting the platform allocate them first, turns potential write-offs into ordinary sales. None of this requires your customers to think about expiry, it just quietly shapes what gets picked.

The cold chain is yours, honestly

Here is the honest boundary. Software does not keep anything cold. Selldi records that a product is chilled or frozen, flags handling requirements, and can keep temperature-sensitive lines organised so a delivery is planned sensibly. But the refrigerated van, the loading-dock discipline, the temperature logging your food-safety scheme demands, the driver who does not leave frozen goods on a pavement in July, that is your logistics operation, and no platform replaces it. A good system gives your team clean information to run the cold chain well; it does not run it for you. Any vendor who tells you their software "handles" the cold chain is selling a story.

Orders arrive however the customer feels like sending them

Even with a slick portal, a chunk of food-service ordering still comes in by email, often as a photographed list, a PDF from the customer's own system, or an Excel sheet. Someone in your office normally retypes those into the ERP, which is slow and where transposed quantities creep in. Selldi's AI Email Reader takes the emailed order, the attachment, the spreadsheet, reads it, matches it to your products and pushes it into the order flow for a human to confirm. Your team stops being a typing pool and starts checking exceptions, which is a far better use of people who know your range.

One platform, both sides of the counter, across borders

Plenty of food and beverage businesses sell wholesale and direct at once, a roastery supplying cafés while shipping bags to home customers, a producer with trade accounts and a consumer following. Selldi runs a B2B store and a B2C store on the same warehouse, products and customer data, so you are not reconciling two disconnected systems and two versions of stock. Sell the last twelve cases to a café and the consumer store knows they are gone.

For distributors selling across the EU, the platform is multi-currency and available in eight languages, so a buyer in another country orders in their language and their currency while you keep one back office. Cross-border food trade carries its own paperwork, labelling, and rules that live outside any commerce platform, but on the ordering and pricing side, one system serving several markets beats a separate setup per country.

Your reps, and your ERP, stay in the loop

Food-service accounts are relationships, not self-service transactions. The built-in CRM gives your sales reps a view of who they look after, what those accounts buy, what has gone quiet and what needs a call before a competitor's rep gets there first. A rep can place or adjust an order on a customer's behalf, which is how a lot of real wholesale business is actually done, over a coffee, on-site, mid-conversation.

Underneath, Selldi connects to your ERP via API, whether that is SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite or another system, so stock, orders and invoicing stay in one source of truth rather than being rekeyed between the shop front and the back office. The platform is the ordering and relationship layer; your ERP stays the system of record.

When this is not the right fit

It is worth being straight about where a platform like this is overkill. If you supply one or two large customers on bespoke contracts with no repeat self-service ordering, a portal adds little; those deals live in long-term agreements. If your range never repeats, if every order is a fresh negotiation, the reorder machinery that makes food-service ordering fly does not have much to grip. And if your real bottleneck is the warehouse or the fleet rather than order handling, fix the physical operation first; better software on top of a broken cold chain just lets you take orders you cannot deliver well.

But for the typical food and beverage wholesaler, dozens or hundreds of accounts, repeat orders, tight margins, expiry to manage and buyers who value their time, the payoff is concrete. The chef's ninety-second reorder is the visible part. The invisible part is the batch that shipped before it turned, the credit check that did not need a phone call, the emailed order that did not get retyped, and the rep who called the account that went quiet. That is what a platform built for this trade is supposed to do.