With over 30 years of excellence and experience, TigerChef has proven itself to be one of the best and fastest growing companies in the food service industry. Aside from fulfilling the needs of the casual cook, we pride ourselves on our ability to take you from consultation to completion, making the design and purchase of your commercial kitchen as smooth and as satisfying a process as it can possibly be. TigerChef’s selection is unrivaled and features over 200,000 products! We’ve written before about so-called “alternative” sources of distribution for hospitality tabletop products, such as IKEA, www.Amazon.com, etc. Well, www.TigerChef.com has come to our attention and we have to say it’s a pretty impressive site. With all the basic categories of hospitality products, TigerChef has an easily navigated site that has plenty of good photography and seems pretty easy to use. We think that sites like non-traditional distributors like TigerChef will continue to proliferate as more operators become less enamored with their current traditional sources of supply. When the operator perceives little differentiation among the products….and less and less value from their source of supply….they will seek to go where it is cheapest an most convenient.
Traditional dealers will have to continue to work hard to earn their place – and their markups – by making sure they are bringing real value to the restaurateurs they serve. Operators who have trouble understanding what value their “regular” distributor is adding to the distribution chain will seek alternative suppliers like TigerChef (and others) that offer relatively minimal service, but likewise will likely have smaller product markups.
In the meantime, manufacturers will be under pressure from traditional supply chain distributors to not sell internet-only vendors. This short-term defense strategy will work…but only for a while. The answer seems to be for the traditional brick & mortar distributor/dealers to continue to work to minimize overheads, logistical costs, and markups….all the while improving the perceived value they bring to their customers.
None of which is easy to do. Especially for those entrenched in their ways for years, and in some cases generations. (change IS hard)
You can check out the TigerChef site by going to: www.tigerchef.com
