How to Leverage Historical Insights When Buying Wholesale Produce
Did you know that you can use data to improve your wholesale produce purchase experience? And every activity in the produce supply chain provides data.
As your business grows, you’ll want to find new ways to improve the buying experience, and data is a key part of it. Data helps with developing new solutions, informing purchases while bringing clarity to problems.
Tools like capture supply chain data, automating daily business operations while recording vital metrics that are useful for historical analysis.
This article describes how to best use historical insights when buying wholesale produce.
What are historical insights?
Historical insights encompass all the past information involved with a business’ operations, including metrics like vendor history, price, availability, profitability, quality, and waste.
Knowing how to leverage these parameters will enable you to make informed decisions to improve your business outcomes.
Here’s more specifically what these metrics mean.
Vendor history: Vendor history is crucial because who you buy from matters. Some vendors are more reliable than others. Their business and transaction history shows you the quality of their produce, from harvesting to distribution.
Price: Assuming you have a budget, you’ll need to find the closest figures to what you have available. The ability to track the price of produce allows you to save time and avoid negotiations.
Availability: Seasonality can be a concern in the produce industry, with some fruits and vegetables being unavailable throughout the year (thus causing a reliance on imports). Timeliness is key as you track produce seasons and cycles to know when demand is at its peak. Historical insights are vital for purchase.
Profitability: This metric tracks and projects how much profit you can potentially make when buying.
Waste: Waste varies with produce, with some products perishing faster than others. This insight allows you to make snap decisions to reduce the risk of wastage.
How to leverage historical insights to improve purchasing
Here’s how to leverage insights when buying wholesale produce.
1. Use them as guidelines
To avoid uninformed spending, it’s best to use historical insights as guidelines for spending. Having actual information to guide your choices can go a long way. You can leverage historical insights by noting the best metrics related to your purchase.
Start with your budget and the cost of the fresh produce. Past and current prices can guide you towards favorable negotiation by giving you a starting point. Previous price ranges enable you to avoid exceeding your budget while also avoiding compromising on quality.
By observing past and current market data, you’ll also be able to determine if you should buy more or less inventory, setting yourself up for profitability in the market.
2. Build trust
Historical insights allow you a chance to build trust with suppliers.
Use historical insights to build a personalized pipeline for future wholesale purchases with trusted growers. Their track records show the quality of business they offer. Building trust using this track record allows you to save time, get discounts, and get early notifications on availability, as well as other supplier-insider information unavailable to wholesalers.
Some vital metrics in this case include quality, availability, and wastage of fresh produce over time.
3. Assess quality produce
Akin to building trust is the benefit of quality over quantity. Essentially, this is about avoiding recalls.
The quantity-over-quality problem is risky. If you buy a large quantity of fresh produce that poses a safety risk (or has a short shelf life), you will lose profit. The implications of bad deals arising from choosing quantity over quality are waste, financial loss, and even worse: a lawsuit.
As you use historical insights to build trust, it’s in your best interest to verify the quality of your purchase. It’s equally in your best interest to buy wholesale produce based on quality rather than quantity.
4. Set goals
Intelligent data enables you to adjust your buying goals and improve profitability.
Blind forecasting derails your plan, may strain your budget, and results in waste. The solution to the problem of blind forecasting is data-driven goal setting. A realistic view helps you seal leaks and plug holes for potential losses.
The performance metrics available in historical insights enable expectations and predictions. It’s suitable for planning, adjusting your goals for the better, and improving your market outcomes.
Historical insights may also indicate routes to avoid, reliable shippers, the best insurance policies to use, and eco-friendly strategies when you decide to ship your latest purchase of fresh produce.
5. Identify new opportunities
Make new purchases that work for your business using historical insights.
It’s good to stick to your plan and budget, but market data can present opportunities not originally anticipated, which may end up being beneficial for your business.
For instance, COVID-19 caused an unpredictable shift in fresh produce markets. With daily automation of business operations, as provided by ERP platforms, you can catch these trends in time and make the best of the market.
