Beyond Benchmarks: How Food Distributors Can Operationalize Excellence — Insights from IFDA Solutions Conference

Food distributors are being asked to do more with fewer people, tighter margins, and rising customer expectations—often while still relying on lagging reports and gut feel. At the IFDA 2025 Solutions Conference, BFC Software CEO Will Collins and Kohl Wholesale GM Aaron Kerkhoff shared how they’re using warehouse data, daily coaching, and better returns discipline to move beyond benchmarks and build a more predictable, profitable operation.

Below are a few of the most practical takeaways from their conversation, plus the full session recording.

Takeaway #1: Benchmarks are where you start, not where you stop

• Will used aggregate benchmarks across BFC’s customer base to help Aaron see where Kohl was strong (mispicks, scan rate, fill rate) and where there was clear upside (selector productivity, returns).
• The value wasn’t “you’re good” or “you’re bad”—it was, “Here is where the next dollar of effort is most valuable.”

Takeaway #2: Coaching the bottom quartile beats obsessing over the top performers

• Kohl already had incentives and some “hero” selectors crushing their numbers. The breakthrough came when they focused on the bottom eight selectors, reviewed their performance daily, and paired the data with real conversations and coaching.
• Result: that cohort went from ~70 picks/hour to over 100, and eventually performed on par with the rest of the team—without dragging everyone else down.

Takeaway #3: Manual spreadsheets hide both problems and wins

• Before the project, shift managers were spending hours pulling reports into Excel, and the feedback loop was slow (“we’ll look at this again in next week’s meeting”).
• With dashboards showing scan %, mispicks, shorts, returns, and productivity in one place, the data moved from being a reporting artifact to a daily decision tool—including rethinking how an analyst spends time (less report-building, more surfacing actionable anomalies for managers).

Takeaway #4: Returns are a silent tax until you actually measure them

• Once Kohl could segment returns by SKU and reason code, a big, low-margin problem jumped out: water. Confusing SKUs + process gaps + turnover in a key customer service role led to unnecessary full-pallet returns.
• Fixing descriptions, tightening policies, raising prices, and cleaning up reason codes created immediate impact—and exposed the need for a more granular, consistent way to categorize returns going forward.

Want to hear the full back-and-forth between Will and Aaron—including how they think about incentives, coaching, and AI’s role in all of this? Watch the full IFDA 2025 Solutions Conference session below.

For many distributors, the hardest part isn’t caring about operational excellence—it’s knowing where to start and how to turn data into daily action. If you’re exploring ways to benchmark your operation, clean up returns, or get more predictable selector performance, we’re always happy to compare notes.

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