Substitution pair

A guide or contracted item that stopped being ordered and an off-guide item in the same category that started, at the same accounts. Aggregated across the base, the pairs are the maintenance list for guides, catalogues or contracts.

DefinitionA guide or contracted item that stopped being ordered and an off-guide item in the same category that started, at the same accounts. Aggregated across the base, the pairs are the maintenance list for guides, catalogues or contracts.

Same category, same accounts, same period

The three conditions that separate a substitution from a new need.

Check the rebate

A brand switch that leaves the rebate-eligible item is a cost to the account as well as to the guide.

How it is computed

An item on the guide or contract that stopped being ordered, paired with an off-guide item in the same category that started at about the same time.

Example

A kitchen stopped ordering the contracted fryer oil in March and began ordering a different brand from the same distributor at a lower margin.

Where it goes wrong

Seen as one product declining and another growing, in two different reports.

Articles that use this term

Data quality and reconciliation · Foodservice distributors

Order guide compliance: what a kitchen was set up to buy against what it buys

How a foodservice distributor measures how closely each kitchen's orders follow the order guide it was set up with, from the order guide file and the delivery ledger: guide items ordered, guide items never ordered, off-guide items ordered instead, the substitution pairs that recur, the kitchens whose guide is stale, and why a low compliance figure is usually a guide problem before it is a customer problem.

16 Sept 20263 min read Data quality and reconciliation

Product taxonomy for analytics: lines, families and SKUs, and which level each measure uses

Why a product list with four hundred SKUs produces whitespace everywhere and a concentration figure that means nothing, the three levels a product taxonomy needs, line, family and SKU, which measure is computed at which level, the rule that a SKU belongs to exactly one family and a family to exactly one line, the dated mapping that survives a range change, and the identity that revenue sums identically at every product level.

16 Sept 20263 min read Wallet share and penetration · Foodservice distributors

Ten questions a foodservice distributor president asks, and the table that answers each

The ten questions the president of a foodservice distributor puts to the route and national account teams, which kitchens dropped a delivery day, which chain sites are off the agreement while the chain looks compliant, what should each kitchen be ordering given its menu, which order guides are stale, which deliveries landed during service, which accounts take a drop a day for a small order, which kitchens are dormant against their own cadence, what is contribution per account after drops, which chains are under-penetrated by site, and what changed, each with the table from the delivery ledger, the site master and the proof-of-delivery data, and the answer to send back.

16 Sept 20263 min read