Our cut fruit turns in three days, but one of our distributors insists on a five-day lead and full cases — how are you negotiating pack breaks or guaranteed sale on promos without trashing shrink or the vendor relationship? I’m trying to hold waste under 2% and keep their fill rate above 97%; any luck with ripeness specs, pooled drops, or scan-downs to bridge the gap?
We’ve kept shrink near 1.5% by writing a scan-down with @vendor: ‘if Day-2 sell-thru <80%, credit remaining to cost,’ paired with a 60–70% ripeness-on-arrival spec — training wheels for promos without dinging fill. Can you pool a DC drop to build mixed ‘rainbow’ cases 2x/week so you meet their full-case rule?
Quick example: we shifted a 5‑day, full‑case fruit program to one PO with ‘60% ship Day 0, 40% DC release Day 2’ plus a $3 split‑pick; the DC pools across nearby stores so the vendor still ships full, and we add ‘D‑1 pack on second release’ to keep the 3‑day clock honest. Can your @distributor stage a release under one PO, or is it true cross‑dock only?
We moved the clock to our DC: buy whole fruit on the 5‑day rhythm, finish‑cut daily at the commissary with a brix/color spec, and add a temp‑logger clause that funds Day‑3 markdowns if transit warms up; that kept us about 1.8% shrink and 98%+ fill. @troy_hill72, do you have access to a shared kitchen or light‑process hub?
We solved this by adding a 36‑hour flex window to the 5‑day PO: vendor reserves the cases, then we send a final cut sheet 36h pre‑ship that they honor down to half‑cases on promo SKUs for a $2 split fee, and we split markdowns if Day‑2 sell‑thru <75%. @sandra_lee22 does your distributor allow a late allocation like that, or would they need a pooled route to cover the splits?
On promos we re-labeled case breaks as a “rainbow” full case — think case-break in costume: vendor kits 12 as 4/4/4 across SKUs, counts as full-case for them but gives us 4‑unit control per store; paired with FEFO at the DC and an auto scan-down trigger at 54 hours, we held shrink about 1.7% and kept 98% fill. Building on @mscott29, we also referenced GS1 date capture (https://www.gs1.org/standards/gs1-data-bar) in the PO so we could target the right lot to the right stores instead of eating Day‑3 trash.