Distributor to Distro
Our journey to build a farm-to-retail distribution network began about 14 months back, focusing on the potato supply chain in Kenya; specifically from Molo to Nairobi. If you heard stories of our Molo experiences, you’d laugh. It was hard enough doing the operational bit, all we needed was software to streamline our day-to-day.
And they were none.
There was no software tailored to the African market. As such, we had to build an internal tool for ourselves. I guess that’s where Agri-tech comes from; the operational bit and the fact that you have to build the tools that enable you. Starting from stock-taking, to CRM supporting our field sales, last-mile logistics management with 3rd party operatives. We built the most complicated dashboard ever and then we started getting data. With data, our relationships with our partners improved. Our goal was to use demand-driven information to improve the way our farmers produced and how we distributed and eventually scale that model. And it was working.
If you ever came across our pitch deck, you’ll see boldly written under our name “The future of food distribution on the African continent”. So each time we evaluated our monthly performance or quarterly, it’s funny how many bruises we’ll have from traditional day-to-day operations. So much for the future…
With that in mind, we knew the key to the future was in understanding the today and structuring a better tomorrow. We needed more data. However, the amount of data needed to improve how food is produced and distributed couldn’t be generated by Farmula alone.
What then was Farmula? A distributor or a medium through which food distribution was improved?
The earliest days had us working with distributors instead of Farmers. Their supply was flexible and we could better understand how the market worked. It paid off. When conducting a survey late last year, of 100 distributors, 60% had manual systems in place to understand how their inventory depleted, 5% were using software and the rest had no particular books to keep records. It was interesting but it worked. They always had large assortments, were profitable YoY, and accessed credit facilities when necessary.
When asked, 98% of these distributors started the business because it was just good money; but where it’s cheap, sell where it’s needed. But, just because they made good money, didn’t mean they couldn’t make more. However, there’s a cap on the growth potential of traditional distributors because they lacked the tools to boost their growth. Just like us, they were in fixed locations, but unlike us did 0 field sales, 56% of them had no on-hand logistics, and key data was limited like which retailers were churning.
In a full year of operations, we grew our customer base 5X, our revenue 6X, and our inventory 7X by focusing on the key areas traditional distributors were falling short of.
Whatever tool we’ll need to bring together our learnings had to be intuitive, it had to be a combination of simple and complex. Simple to use but solving the most complicated of tasks; relationship management, inventory management, seamless field sales, and access to tailored logistics.
Version 1
If you looked up the word complex online, you’ll see a snapshot of our first dashboard. As earlier mentioned, our first version was a dashboard with farmer contacts, market prices, our blog, price prediction charts, account books, retailer contacts, bulk SMS capabilities, route tracking, everything you could think of.
Over time, it evolved, removing the excessive features and trimming them down to primary operations. What do we do every day as distributors of food? We buy and we sell.
Distro is live!
I have the pleasure of introducing to you our version 2.0 of the Farmula app for distributors called Distro. Distro digitizes a distributor's operations and makes it seamless to leverage our scalable infrastructure.
These are the features and improvements we’ve made for Distributors:
Offline first
No limits; you can purchase and sell while offline.
Money In, Money Out
With the app, you can easily record purchases and sales which output singular figures that portray the health of your Distro and even enable you monitor multiple accounts when you have different distribution centers.
Inventory Tracking
You also know what inventories are finishing and get automated alerts without having to count inventory. This helps better drive your purchases to satisfy your customer’s demands
Market Info
Am I buying it expensive, am I getting the best deals? Market intelligence leverages our existing relationships with producers to ensure you are getting the best purchase prices in the market.
Direct Sales
How can you get more sales? Whenever we compare potential growth with Farmula as against without us, distributors laugh “I’ve been in this business for years”. Through distro, we can provide your inventory to hundreds of Retailers easily.
Better discovery = More Sales = More revenue
Profile Management
Through your profiles, you can generate your financial books and gain faster and easier access to facilities from financial partners.
With Distro, we simplify complex operations and puts that power in the palms of distributors because we understand the difficulties that come with digitizing manual operations. We provide personal account managers to listen to and address feedback through Whatsapp, in-app, and calls. In the end, it’s only through listening that we can build a platform customers will love.
If you are interested in early access, fill out this form and we’ll be in touch.
