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Anthony Rose: Hello, and in today’s Founder Interview with amazing founders, I’m talking to Jack from Platter, where we’re going to discover how the wholesale food industry works. So, hello, Jack, tell us what Platter does.
Jack Clegg: Hi, thanks for having me. Well, Platter is an all-in-one platform for the wholesale food industry. And what many people don’t understand about the wholesale food industry is the complex layers and the players where food manufacturers have a retail channel, but often they don’t understand that there’s a third player in this. So food manufacturers make pallets of goods and they are sold to wholesalers or distributors and there are lots of different names. And having worked myself and born and bred into the food industry, I spent over 10 years in a family wholesale business, working as a wholesale buyer. And I was buying from food manufacturers across the UK and Europe. And then for 10 years I’d worked for the manufacturers selling to wholesalers.
And there are really three main players. So there’s food manufacturers to wholesalers and wholesalers selling to end users. And we say end users, mean pubs, restaurants, Borough Market, all those types of people.
Anthony Rose: Okay. So your target audience are manufacturers of foods who know all about cheese, not of the internet age, so to speak. Tell me about the problems they’ve got about inventory management and, you know, audit processing and logistics and so on and how Platter helps them.
Jack Clegg: Yeah, sure. So this was estimated around 76% of food manufacturers are still taking orders on telephone, email, and this long-winded, having spent all that time working both ends of this industry, you know, I spent thousands of hours myself, you know, managing these processes. So we’re looking to just really simplify that and by providing online technology for them to digitise their process.
But not only is it 76% not ordering online, this is only 25 % of products are actually being bought from buyers by suppliers.
Anthony Rose: Okay, so you, let’s say I run a farm somewhere and I’m currently with pen and paper, which is insane. And I’ve heard of this thing called the internet and then Platter finds me. I find Platter, you come in. What sort of sort of ticket size, you know, for someone interested in, you know, getting involved with Platter, how much are you going to charge me? And then how many such opportunities are there in the UK?
Jack Clegg: So we, like I we target the manufacturers. If we found you or you found us, we would create you an online store. So we would digitise your process. You would then be able to invite your customer base to start ordering digitally. So again, that saves you vast amounts of time and also the upsell opportunity. We start from around a thousand pound a month, but we also have integrations across various ERP, finance, and transport, and we offer foodware solutions as well.
Anthony Rose: Okay, so you’re basically taking an age-old ordering, you know, scenario and bringing the internet age to us. That’s fantastic. So what’s your traction so far?
Jack Clegg: So the traction so far, so we’ve been running for around 18 months. We’ve got four paying manufacturers and we’ve onboarded their buyers. We’ve four more manufacturers ready to be onboarded with over 350 buyers waiting to be onboarded to the system.
We have a finance trial between buyer and supplier where we take a revenue share with a demand planning tool, POC, that we’ve just gone live with again on another revenue share and we’ve launched our food charity feature which allows food manufacturers and wholesalers to donate to a charity of their choice. They can then use that information to clear against corporation tax and we offer that service totally free to any user.
Anthony Rose: That’s very clever. And so what’s your projection in five years? How many manufacturers will you have on board? You know, what’s the revenue plan for, you know, and is it focused on the UK or is it beyond the UK?
Jack Clegg: So we’re looking at Europe just with the nature of in which the food moves is over 42 % of the food in the UK comes from Europe, predominantly France, Germany, Italy and Spain. We have a manufacturer already on board that’s from out of the UK and we just do the tech between UK and Ecuador in fact, but they have several other countries. So our target market is Europe and there’s roughly around 1.1 something million users that we’re targeting.
We’re looking for around two to 3000 over five years at a total target price of around 30,000 a year ticket.
Anthony Rose: So give me an example of one of your customers and how they use Platter to change the way they do ordering.
Jack Clegg: Yes, so we work with a company called FDL Cheese from Leicestershire. They’ve been a third-generation cheese grater and slicer. We’ve reached out to them to digitise their process. And after initial trials with 10 buyers, they managed to bring on all their customers. And this resulted in saving them over 22 hours of invoicing time every month. And not to mention the upsell. Most customers bought five products from their portfolio, when in fact they had over 22. So by digitising it, they also saw an increase in sales.
Anthony Rose: That’s fantastic. So it’s just kind of like the Shopify of food manufacturing, transforming something that people would have done kind of manually into now, it’s not a marketplace, but it’s a transformative, easy-to-use process.
Jack Clegg: Yeah, we look at ourselves sometimes by saying, you know, a good way to explain to somebody is, you do your shopping on Shopify. Why don’t you do your business that way? By digitising product range leads to an increase in sales. So by offering an online store creates visibility and an increase in traction as well.
Anthony Rose: How can people find out more about Platter? Where do they go?
Jack Clegg: Well, I’m very active on LinkedIn. You can go to our website, which is weareplatter.com or drop me an email at [email protected] and yeah, you can hear more about it from me.
Anthony Rose: Amazing. Thank you, Jack.
