| Business Bytes

Let’s talk images again. While you may have heard us talk about images in the past, possibly in our first town hall webinar with Food Marketing Solutions or our previous blog on image compliance, we are still fielding questions on why it’s important to work with a professional photographer and what to expect. So, we are digging into some more of the logistics around getting your images taken and what you should expect from a professional engagement with a company … Read more

In today’s world, shopping online seems to be a pretty robust e-commerce experience for consumers. When it comes to foodservice marketing best practices, however, our VP of Customer Experience, Jason Gunn, discovered several shortcomings related to marketing; images, descriptions, and content, when trying to help his customers feel comfortable making purchasing decisions online. If there’s anyone reading this who has never shopped online, come and see Jason Gunn personally. For the rest of us, let’s take a look at a … Read more

In our Town Hall with special guest, Ray Poinsette, Director of Process Improvement at Beaver Street Fisheries, we talked about how Beaver Street went from making every mistake possible with GTINs to having best-in-class content by leveraging scorecards. Poinsette feels it’s important to share their journey to help their partners and support everyone working together for GDSN synchronization. An industry leader’s guide to achieve 100% on all of your GS1 scorecards Beaver Street Fisheries is not only known for their … Read more

More than 70% of operators are going to be buying products online by the end of this year, according Cleveland Research Company. This means whatever your product information looks like in the distributor’s system is what they see. As a supplier, you have to ask yourself… what do my products look like? Am I providing the right information? Are my images helping or hurting my sales? For the last 10 years, suppliers have been haphazardly collecting images and marketing content … Read more

A supplier once told me that one of his interns has a ‘nice’ camera and is an amateur photography buff. Against my advisement, he insisted that the intern would take the pictures at the warehouse and photoshop them. Cheap and easy. Unsurprisingly, the images he got back were pixelated and the crop-job done in photoshop lined up with the photographer’s experience: amateur. It finally resonated with my customer − the president and second-generation owner of the company − that he … Read more

How often do you get your GS1 scorecard from a distributor and see something drastically different than what you thought it should be? Why is it that when you think you’re compliant you end up not being compliant?! Well, there’s a number of factors at play here, but let’s talk about some things that should help guide you to compliance a little faster. And, as always, call me if you have questions! We can help. You’re being scored on ALL … Read more

Data Pool Vendor Ignored Calls from a F100 Food Manufacturer? What the #!%& The Director of Foodservice Sales for a Fortune 100 manufacturer – one we all know and love, but shall remain nameless for now – was frustrated. Her products were not showing up in search results within one of their distributor’s online shopping tools. The distributor’s system was not receiving images, nutritional information, and marketing detail, so products were being penalized in search results. The data should have … Read more

When shopping and ordering online, foodservice sales reps and customers are reliant on the information displayed within a distributor’s system. Unfortunately, as of June 2017, GS1 reports that less than 40% of products being communicated via GS1’s Global Data Synchronization network (GDSN) contain at least one image. Now the big question is: are those images even any good? All too often we find pictures of a crushed box or images taken by the intern who fancies him or herself an … Read more

What items are missing data? Is the data that I’m providing the same data that my distributors are looking for? My data pool says my data is compliant – why is my scorecard looking so grim? How come my scorecard looked good last month, but now I have items failing? The Attribytes team receives questions like these – and more – every day. It’s OK. You are not alone. We are going to get through it together. First, let’s talk … Read more