For distributors
Turn every invoice into a retention opportunity
Your accounts already send you the data. Give them a costing tool they will actually open — under your brand — and see share-of-wallet drift months before the account is gone.
15-minute onboarding · No POS required · Your brand
| Account | Share of wallet | 90-day drift |
|---|---|---|
| Harbor & Vine | 62% | −9 pts |
| Ninth Street Cafe | 78% | −2 pts |
| The Lakehouse | 84% | +3 pts |
| Brickyard BBQ | 41% | −14 pts |
01 — The problem
Accounts do not churn. They thin out.
A lost account is the last event in a sequence that started two quarters earlier, in categories nobody was watching. The signal exists — it is sitting in order history that nothing reads.
- Erosion nobody logs
- Share of wallet leaves a category at a time. Nothing in the order history says 'we moved produce to a competitor in April' — the line simply stops appearing.
- Software the operator will not open
- Portals with a ninety-day implementation get abandoned at week three. Adoption is the whole game: a tool nobody logs into produces no signal for you either.
- Reps walking in unarmed
- Without cost data the visit is a relationship call. With it, the rep opens on the four items whose price moved and what the operator's plate costs did in response.
- Price conversations you always lose
- A competitor's quote sheet compares badly to your invoice because the pack sizes differ. Per-unit maths, done in the open, usually argues in favour of the incumbent.
02 — The mechanism
Adoption on their side is visibility on yours
An operator uses PlateCost because it saves them money — The Lakehouse found $177,000 a year in one menu reprice. The by-product is a live picture of their purchasing, which is the picture your reps have never had.
- Saved in the first menu reprice at the founder's own restaurant
- $177KSaved in the first menu reprice at the founder's own restaurant
- Share-of-wallet drift surfaced before it reaches a renewal conversation
- 90 daysShare-of-wallet drift surfaced before it reaches a renewal conversation
- From an account's first login to its first costed invoice
- 15 minFrom an account's first login to its first costed invoice
Actual invoice from one of The Lakehouse’s vendors. Five line items, one hand-circled total, extracted in under a minute. Click to enlarge.
We read the invoices nobody else can.
Your independent operators won't clean up their invoices for you. PlateCost reads them as-is — so your accounts actually onboard and stay.
Snap a photo on your phone
The moment the driver hands you the ticket. Clipboard, warehouse light, coffee stains — we handle it.
Drop a PDF at your desk
Upload a batch at the end of the day. Every line item extracted and matched to your recipes in under a minute.
Forward the vendor email
Vendor portals send PDFs on autopilot. Forward them to your ingest address and we take it from there.
EDI or direct integration
For the distributors that want zero-touch. We wire into the feed and your invoices flow in automatically.
03 — How it works
What the rollout actually looks like
No integration project on your side and none on theirs. The critical path is the operator uploading a document.
Step 1
Your accounts upload invoices
Yours and everyone else's. Universal extraction is what makes the share-of-wallet number honest rather than a view of your own orders.
app.platecost.io/documents/new Drop invoices here
PDF, JPEG or HEIC — or forward them to invoices@your-org.platecost.io
sysco-2026-09-02.pdf62 of 62 linesusfoods-2026-09-04.pdfextracting…Step 2
They get costing they keep using
Recipe costs that update themselves are the reason an operator opens the tool weekly instead of abandoning it. Retention of the software is retention of the signal.
app.platecost.io/report — food cost by plate Plate Against 30% target Food cost Ribeye plate 28.0% Shrimp & grits 33.6% Smash burger 26.4% Lobster roll 41.2% Caesar, half 19.8% Step 3
Your team sees what moved
Price movement per item and category drift per account, so a rep walks into the meeting knowing which four lines to talk about.
app.platecost.io/items/butter-unsalted-36lb — price history Butter, unsalted — price per lb
+15.2% since April
$0.92Apr$0.94May$0.99Jun$1.01Jul$1.04Aug$1.06SepSix increases, none of which looked wrong on the invoice that carried it.
04 — Retention
Early warning, in categories rather than in totals
Total spend is a lagging and noisy number — a slow month looks like a defection and a defection looks like a slow month. Category-level penetration separates the two.
- Per-account share of wallet, with ninety-day drift
- Category penetration, so a produce loss is not hidden by a protein gain
- At-risk flagging before renewal, while an intervention is still cheap
- The operator sees their own data; you see the aggregate you are entitled to
| Account | Share of wallet | 90-day drift |
|---|---|---|
| Harbor & Vine | 62% | −9 pts |
| Ninth Street Cafe | 78% | −2 pts |
| The Lakehouse | 84% | +3 pts |
| Brickyard BBQ | 41% | −14 pts |
05 — Rep enablement
A visit that opens with their numbers
The strongest argument a rep has is usually the per-unit comparison, honestly done. It just needs pack sizes reconciled first — which is exactly what the platform does before anyone walks in.
- Per-unit prices corrected for pack size across every supplier the account uses
- Which items moved this month and what it did to the account's plate costs
- Upsell targets grounded in what they already buy elsewhere
- Talking points that are arithmetic rather than a discount
Butter, unsalted, 36 lb — price per lb
| Sysco | current supplier | $1.06 |
| Ben E. Keith | best price | $0.94 |
| US Foods | order guide, Aug | $1.11 |
At 640 lb a month, switching this one line saves $921 a year.
06 — White label
Your brand on the front, our engine underneath
Operators see your name, your colours, your support address. We stay invisible, non-exclusive and out of the customer relationship entirely.
- Your domain and brand throughout the operator-facing product
- REST and MCP access, so it can sit inside a portal you already run
- Runs alongside your ordering system rather than replacing it
- Per-organization isolation: no account of yours is visible to another distributor
- sysco-2026-09-02.pdf62 linesApproved
- usfoods-2026-09-04.pdf41 linesNeeds review
- benekeith-2026-09-05.pdfextracting…Processing
“If you don’t operate on true data you are a leaf on the wind.”
Michael Lucas / The Lakehouse
I'm the kind of customer your reps call on.
I bought a restaurant. One location, no food-cost team, no POS integration budget. I'm exactly the independent operator your sales team is trying to keep — and I built PlateCost because the tools aimed at 100-location chains never fit accounts like mine.
You lose accounts you never saw slipping.
Our best-selling dish was running at 54% food cost and neither I nor my rep could see it. Operators like me can't tell which line items are actually cheaper where — so we second-guess every order, blame the distributor, and churn. The margin crisis is ours to feel, but the account you lose is yours to replace.
Healthy operators are the ones who keep buying.
When I got the math right, fish-and-chips revenue went up 40%. Same play on High Noon seltzers. I stopped second-guessing orders and stayed in business. The real result for whoever was selling me: a stickier account, a bigger basket, and an operator who calls back — so everyone gets back to what makes this industry fun.
Under your brand. Your operators. Your data.
PlateCost white-labeled gives your one-to-five-location customers the food-cost tool they can't find anywhere else — and gives you the intelligence to grow share-of-wallet, reduce churn, and see which SKUs actually win. Fifteen-minute onboarding. No POS dependency. A yellow brick road your reps can actually hand over.
07 — Terms of the relationship
What we will and will not do with the data
A distributor is handing us their customer relationships. The limits below are structural rather than contractual — they are how the system is built.
- Your accounts' data stays theirs
- Each restaurant is its own organization behind row-level security. You see the aggregate you are entitled to, never another distributor's accounts, and never a competitor's pricing.
- Vendor neutral by design
- We do not sell food and we do not resell your data. PlateCost runs alongside whatever else an operator uses, non-exclusively.
- You own the relationship
- Your brand, your domain, your support address. The operator is your customer; we are the software underneath.
- Enterprise-grade handling
- Encrypted in transit and at rest, private object storage with signed reads, audit trails on every write, and a SOC 2 path.
08 — Questions
Asked on every platform review
What does white-label actually cover?
Your brand, colours, domain and support address on the operator-facing product. The invoice-extraction engine and the costing model are shared; nothing that identifies PlateCost is shown to your accounts.
Do my accounts have to buy anything?
That is your call. Distributors typically fund the seats as a retention programme, which is also what drives adoption high enough for the analytics to be worth reading.
How long does a deployment take?
Weeks, not quarters. There is no POS integration in the critical path, and an account is productive after its first invoice upload.
Do you compete with us?
No. We sell software to restaurants and to distributors. We do not sell food, we do not broker it, and we do not sell purchasing data to anyone who does.
What do reps see?
Account-level share of wallet, category penetration, and the drift over the last ninety days — with the individual invoices behind it visible only to the operator who owns them.
Can it run alongside our existing portal?
Yes. Everything in PlateCost is available over a REST API and an MCP server, so ordering stays where it is and the cost intelligence is what gets embedded.
Run a restaurant rather than sell to one? Start a free trial or read the restaurant page.
See it with one of your accounts
Bring a customer's recent invoices to a 30-minute review and we will show you the share-of-wallet picture they produce.
14-day free trial · No contracts · Cancel anytime