Specialty Food Vendors – Discover How To Transition From Wholesale To Retail

We covered Julie Shipley’s Soup Shop back in January during National Soup Month. We recently interviewed Shipley again and asked her to share some insight on transitioning a specialty food business from wholesale to retail.

Shipley’s culinary career started when she began supplying a local café with homemade soups. The response from diners was so good Shipley expanded to providing a variety of homemade soups for two dozen Central Florida restaurants.
One week she had a surplus of soup and put a small sign in front of her commercial kitchen offering soup takeout.

The result? So much traffic that her landlord kicked her out.

Shipley opened a small retail location in a Publix Shopping Plaza in Melbourne, Florida, and hasn’t looked back.

We recently asked Shipley to share her experience in leaving her wholesale business to focus on retailing.

What were the biggest challenges supplying restaurants with your soup?

Getting orders from them in a timely manner! Sometimes I would have to call them back several times over the span of a day until somebody finally gave me an order. Multiply this by a couple of dozen restaurants and it becomes tedious.

What factors played a role in deciding to transition from wholesale to retail?

I decided to transition from wholesale to retail when I began to have the overhead (payroll etc) of a retail operation. It was no longer economically feasible to sell my soup at wholesale pricing.