Setting Up Vendors and Suppliers Before Opening

Start setting up vendors about eight weeks before you open. You need a broadline food distributor, one or two specialty suppliers (produce, meat, seafood, or bakery), a beverage supplier, a paper and chemical supplier, and service vendors for linen, grease, waste, and pest control. Applications, credit checks, and first-delivery scheduling take longer than new owners expect - accounts opened the week of your soft opening usually mean COD pricing and missing product on your busiest night.

The vendor list you actually need

Do not sign a long exclusive with anyone before you open. You don't yet know your volume, and a twelve-month lock removes your only leverage.

Get quoted on your real order guide

Vendors will quote you a handful of headline items cheaply. Instead, build the actual list of the 40-60 items you'll buy weekly from your opening menu, send it to two or three distributors, and ask each to price the whole guide with pack sizes. Compare cost per usable unit, not per case - a cheaper case with more trim loss is more expensive. Our guide on calculating cost per ounce and per serving shows the math.

Ask each rep, in writing:

• Minimum order for free delivery
• Delivery days and cutoff times
• Fuel surcharges and fees
• How price increases are communicated
• Substitution policy when an item is out
• Whether prices are contracted, market, or cost-plus

Credit terms are worth negotiating

New restaurants usually start COD or on a prepaid card, then move to net terms after three to six months of clean payment history. Ask up front what it takes to earn net 14 or net 30 - that window is real working capital during your slow opening months and directly improves cash flow. Provide your business formation documents, EIN, resale certificate, and trade references early; incomplete applications are the usual reason accounts aren't live on time.

Two suppliers per critical category is the rule that saves opening weeks. One vendor for everything is efficient until the truck doesn't come on a Friday.

Sequence the first orders carefully

Work backwards from your soft opening:

1. Four weeks out - accounts approved, order guides priced, delivery days assigned.
2. Two weeks out - place your smallwares, paper, and chemical orders. These are bulky and you want them before food arrives.
3. One week out - dry goods and non-perishables in, shelving labeled, par levels written on the shelf tags.
4. Two to three days out - perishables for training and menu practice only. Order small; you will over-order.
5. Day before soft opening - final produce, dairy, protein top-off.

Order conservatively for the soft opening. Running out of one special is a much cheaper mistake than throwing away a walk-in of spoiled product before you've taken a dollar.

Set up receiving before the first truck

Decide now who receives, where the scale lives, and what gets checked. Every delivery gets weighed or counted against the invoice, temperatures checked on cold items, and short or damaged product noted on the invoice before the driver leaves. Log invoices the same day so your food cost is real from week one rather than reconstructed later.

If your POS handles inventory and invoice entry, use it from day one instead of promising yourself you'll start later. Owners on an all-in-one platform like Cobblestone POS can tie received invoices to item-level costs and see food cost moving in near real time - which is exactly when a bad price increase is cheap to catch.

Treat reps as partners, not order-takers

Your distributor rep knows which items are about to jump in price, what's overstocked in the warehouse this week, and which local producers deliver reliably. Give them accurate forecasts, pay on time, and consolidate your orders, and the relationship pays for itself. Our guides on building vendor relationships that pay off and negotiating better prices with your vendors cover how to keep that leverage once you're open.

Get the accounts live early, keep two options per category, and start your first week with clean invoices and honest counts. That's the whole difference between guessing at your food cost and knowing it.