Retail outreach for food and beverage brands: selling wholesale to retailers

What retail outreach is, and who it suits

Most emerging food and drink brands sell their first cases the same way: someone from the brand talks to a store owner, hands over a sample and asks for an order. Retail outreach does the first part of that by email. You pick the stores that fit, find the person who chooses the range, and write to them about their store and your product.

It suits brands with a product a store could put on a shelf or a menu: drinks, snacks, sauces, coffee, frozen lines, wine and spirits. Brands still testing an idea can use it too, to see whether stores would want the product before paying for a production run.

The words change by country. In the UK, Australia and New Zealand, a store that carries you is a stockist and the trade is FMCG. In the US it is a retailer or an account, and the trade is CPG. The work is the same.

Why email works for independent stores

The owner of a café, deli or bottle shop spends the day on the floor. A phone call interrupts service, and a walk-in only works when they are free and you are in the same suburb. An email waits until the shop is quiet. It can be read after close, forwarded to whoever does the ordering, and answered in one line.

Email also reaches further than one person on foot. A brand can write to every independent grocer in a city in a fortnight, where visiting them all would take months. One kombucha founder told us they reached more stores in a couple of weeks than they had in a year on their own.

Walk-ins, reps, trade shows and distributors all still have a place. Our guide to how to sell to independent retailers sets out when each one earns its cost.

How we run retail outreach

Each step below exists because brands kept getting it wrong without it.

1. 1Find the stores that fitOne city or region, up to five store types: cafés, grocers, delis, bars, bottle shops, hotels, gyms or anything else with a shelf. We remove poor fits before you see the list. More in finding stores.
2. 2Find the person who decidesThe food and beverage or bar manager first, then the general manager, then the owner. Never a shared accounts inbox. Every address is checked before anything is sent. See how to find a store owner's email.
3. 3Learn about the store, then write to itWhen we find a store we learn what it sells and who it serves. Because we understand your product too, each email says why the two fit. No two stores get the same email. That is the outreach emails part of the product.
4. 4Send from a domain built for itWe buy a separate sending domain for you, set it up and warm it slowly, so your own domain is never at risk. See sending and deliverability.
5. 5Follow up, and stop on a replyA short sequence of emails, each written for that store. The moment the buyer replies, the rest of their emails are cancelled.
6. 6Hand the conversation to youThe reply lands in your inbox, matched to the store. The AI does not answer for you. You take it from there: samples, price, the first order.

Why the emails are short

The length and structure of every email come from years of selling to stores. A buyer reads a cold email on a phone, between deliveries. If they cannot tell in a few seconds what you make and why it suits their shop, they move on.

So each email does four things. It names something true about the store, says what the product is in one line, gives the reason it fits that store, and makes one easy ask, usually a reply to get a sample. It is plain text, with no attachments, no images and no price list. Those make cold email look like marketing and push it towards the spam folder, and the price list is better sent once a buyer has asked for it.

Our guide to how to write a pitch email walks through the structure line by line, and the cold email templates for retailers show it applied to cafés, delis, bars, bottle shops and hotels.

Why we buy you a separate sending domain

Your main domain carries your invoices, your distributor emails and your customer service. If cold outreach from it ever gets marked as spam, all of that suffers. So we buy a separate domain for you to send from. It looks like yours, and anyone who types it in lands on your real website. You keep using your own address for everything else.

Each domain gets a few mailboxes with real names on them, so a buyer sees a person, not a newsletter. Nothing sends until 24 hours after the domain is live. Then each mailbox starts at five emails a day, adds five every five sending days, and reaches its ceiling of thirty a day from the twenty-first. A big list never leaves in one burst. The full detail is on the sending domain page.

Follow-ups do most of the work

Most replies arrive on the second or third email, not the first. The owner meant to answer the first one and got pulled away. A go-to-market campaign sends a first email and three follow-ups; an awareness campaign sends five emails in all. Each one is written for the same store and makes the same easy ask.

The sequence stops itself the moment the buyer replies or unsubscribes, or the address turns out not to exist. An out-of-office does not stop it. Our guide to the follow-up email after no response covers what to say in each one, and the guide to cold email subject lines covers the line that gets the email read at all.

The rules we give every brand

These come from our onboarding calls with brands and from what their campaigns showed.

• Start with one city and one store type. A campaign to the cafés of one city teaches you more than a few stores spread across a country, and you can deliver to and visit them.
• Independents before chains. An owner can say yes this week. A chain buyer wants to see that independents already sell you, so win those first.
• Samples only to stores that ask. Ask the format and the address in the same reply, then agree a day to check in.
• Keep your current customers out. Upload a do-not-contact list of addresses or whole domains before you launch. It stays private to your brand.
• Judge on enough stores. A handful of stores can give no replies by chance. Wait until well over a hundred have had the whole sequence before you change the offer.
• Answer fast. A store that replied today has forgotten you by next week.

Store by store

Every store type buys differently. A café has one fridge and wants a single line that sells; a grocer thinks in shelf space, price and pack size; a bar wants a drink that earns its place on a short list. The store-type guides live in our guide to getting your product into stores, starting with getting your product into cafes. Drinks brands will find the venue-by-venue view in LaunchPal for beverage brands.

If you would rather see the stores before reading any further, see who would stock you: type your website and we show real stores near you that fit your product.

What to expect, and what happens next

A reply is not an order. In this trade the real yes is usually a sample request, and an order follows when the product tastes right and the margin works. Work out the margin before you write with the wholesale price calculator.

After the first order, the job becomes keeping the store reordering. Flow tracks each store from reply to sample, first order and reorder. When enough stores stock you, a distributor becomes worth talking to, and our guide to CPG distribution covers that step.

The Free plan finds and emails 50 stores a month. Paid covers 500 a month.

The guides in this section

Each guide covers one part of the craft, with examples you can use whether or not you use LaunchPal.

• Cold email templates for retailers, by store type.
• How to write a pitch email a store buyer will answer.
• The follow-up email after no response, and when to stop.
• Cold email subject lines for store owners and buyers.
• How to find a store owner's email, and why info@ rarely works.
• How to find stockists in the UK, Australia and New Zealand.
• Cold email vs walk-ins vs reps: when each one works.