The three sales numbers every food distributor should check weekly

Three numbers tell you most of what there is to know about a distribution business in a given week: sales by product, sales by customer, and sales over time. Everything else is commentary. If you can pull those three in under a minute, you will actually look at them every Monday. If pulling them means an export and forty minutes of pivot tables, you will look at them the week after something already went wrong.

This piece covers what each number is for, the decision it should trigger, and the point where computing it by hand stops being worth the ritual.

What's moving: sales by product

Rank the last few weeks by revenue per product and read it twice. The top of the list is your buy list talking to you: the items worth protecting on price, worth featuring in the fresh sheet, worth calling the farm about before someone else does. The bottom is quieter but more expensive. In perishables, a slow SKU is not just tied-up cash the way it is in hardware. It is shrink on a schedule.

Quantity matters as much as revenue here, and it only means something with the unit attached. Two hundred pounds and two hundred cases are different businesses. A product that sells rarely but in cases can quietly out-earn a daily seller by the pound, and a revenue-only view hides that.

The decision this number feeds: what to buy more of, what to stop carrying, and what deserves the lead spot in this week's availability email.

Who's buying: sales by customer

Day to day you notice the accounts that call. You do not notice the one that stopped. A restaurant that ordered every Tuesday for two years does not send a resignation letter; their line on the customer report just gets shorter, and by the time the driver mentions it, a competitor has had the account for a month.

Ranking accounts by spend also puts concentration risk in your face. When one buyer is a third of revenue, that is worth knowing on purpose rather than discovering the week their chef changes. And the ranking is the honest version of your call list: the top ten get relationship attention, the fading regulars get a friendly check-in before it becomes a win-back.

Wholesale and retail deserve to be on the same list. A distributor running both channels usually knows the restaurant numbers cold and has no idea the subscription boxes crossed four figures a month.

How the season is trending: sales over time

Weekly or monthly totals across a long range turn a feeling into a fact. Produce is seasonal by nature, so the question is never whether this month differs from last month. It is whether this June looks like last June, and whether the ramp is early or late. That is a staffing decision, a truck decision, and a buying decision, all of which get made two weeks too late when the trend lives in someone's memory.

The spreadsheet version, and where it cracks

None of this requires software. Distributors have done it for decades with an export, a pivot table, and a Monday-morning hour. The problems are the same ones the whole spreadsheet-and-QuickBooks stack develops: the export is stale by Wednesday, a renamed product splits into two rows, cancelled orders sneak into totals, and the report exists only as long as the person who maintains it does. The number you act on is only as good as the discipline behind the sheet, and discipline is exactly what a busy week eats first.

The operator's guide to distribution software makes the general argument: buy tools for the jobs where manual effort fails quietly. Reporting is one of those jobs, because a wrong report does not look wrong.

What good reporting looks like

Whatever system you use, hold it to a short list. Totals should reconcile with your order records to the cent. Cancelled orders should be excluded without anyone remembering to filter them. A renamed or deleted product should keep its history instead of splitting or vanishing. Date ranges should follow your timezone, so "this month" means your month. And every report should export to a clean CSV, because the day you want to slice deeper, you want the numbers in a spreadsheet, not trapped behind a login.

Minori Midori ships sales reports built this way on every plan: by product, by customer, and over time, for any date range, each one a click away from a CSV your bookkeeper can open without an import wizard. The Monday check takes the minute it should.