Restaurant Association for Cooperative Purchasing

If you are like most independent restaurateurs, you employ one of two methods for most of your purchasing. Either you trust no one and try to buy from several different distributors to keep one pitted against the other, or you principally use one distributor thinking you can trust your sales rep and will be rewarded for your loyalty.

Frankly, neither of these methods works. Distributors and their sales reps want to maximize profits and commissions. If you trust that you are getting excellent pricing because of your loyalty to your rep and distributor, you are probably mistaken. And, if you try to split your business between two or three sales reps thinking this will "keep them honest," you probably do not realize how a sales rep's commission is structured. A rep's commission increases as the profit margin he or she generates for the distributor increases. Thus, these multiple sales reps reach a kind of understanding about dividing your business and will not really undercut each other. You see, if they can keep the profit margin high enough on your purchases, they know that a 7% commission on half of your business means more income than a 2% commission on all of your business. So they will not truly drop your pricing into the most cost effective range.

If these typical purchasing techniques really worked, don't you think the big chains would be purchasing in such a manner? You will never find a corporate chain that trusts any distributor to give them excellent pricing. Moreover, you will never find any corporate chain that simply has a couple of vendors vying for their business on a day-to-day, item-by-item basis. No, you will find that the big chains purchase their goods and services with the exact same methods and diligence that you can enjoy as a member of RACP.

RACP has negotiated guaranteed contracts under which our members purchase their goods and services just like the corporate chains. In addition, RACP has negotiated invaluable audit privileges with our vendors so that we can guarantee that members pay only the negotiated mark-ups. Moreover, there are several rebates from vendors available only to RACP members.