JuicyBite, part 6 of 7
48 stops in LA and Orange County
A market looks very different in a spreadsheet than it does from behind a store counter.
Context
After the trade show, the next job was turning interest into stores, starting with Southern California. The award was our opening line. What we needed was a route.
The problem
Planning a sales trip looks simple: list the stores, find the shortest path between them, go. The important question turned out not to be where the stores were. It was who could say yes.
What I did
The route
I planned a multi-day trip through Los Angeles and Orange County: 48 stops on four routes. Two started from La Puente to cover the San Gabriel Valley and Koreatown, and two from Anaheim Hills to cover northern and southern Orange County. I included all 22 of 99 Ranch’s Southern California locations and five GW Supermarket stores, and built a color-coded map so the team could see the chains at a glance.
| Route | Starting from | Covering |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | La Puente | San Gabriel Valley |
| 2 | La Puente | Koreatown |
| 3 | Anaheim Hills | Northern Orange County |
| 4 | Anaheim Hills | Southern Orange County |
Redrawn around who decides
My first version was organized by geography: shortest driving distance between stops. That was wrong.
At the Korean supermarket chains, branch managers usually can’t make buying decisions. Purchasing is centralized. Walk into a branch first and you get “talk to headquarters,” and you’ve used up your first impression. So I reorganized the whole trip to start with the chains’ headquarters in Koreatown. One buyer there can open many stores at once.
A price floor before anyone gets in the car
I also flagged a risk nobody had raised yet. If we gave small independent stores terms that let them sell below H Mart’s shelf price, we would damage our relationship with our biggest customer in order to win our smallest ones. I recommended setting a minimum advertised price before the trip started.
On the road
Then we went. I visited dozens of stores across Los Angeles and Orange County: walking in, showing the product, and listening to how each store responded.
What I learned
A market looks very different in a spreadsheet than it does from behind a store counter. In my spreadsheet, a store was a row: a name, an address, a chain. In person, it’s someone with limited time and limited shelf space, who often isn’t the one who decides.
A sales route should follow decision-making power, not geography. Visit in order of distance and you meet a lot of people who can’t say yes.
And when you add a channel, the first thing to set isn’t the price. It’s the floor. A conflict with an existing customer costs more than any new sale.