First Bite—a startup led by ex-Impossible Foods exec Reed McCord to help food manufacturers maximize foodservice sales—is tackling the “black box” of trade spending in the channel with a digital rebates platform enabling firms to deliver offers directly to end customers.
Right now, says McCord, managing rebates in the foodservice channel is a uniquely frustrating process in which manufacturers manage vast sums in incentives through paper forms, PDFs, and spreadsheets “with no attribution or visibility and redemption cycles that stretch for months.”
And as distributors—which sit between manufacturers and their end customers—don’t share downstream sales data, “manufacturers don’t know which operators are purchasing and why.”
Meanwhile, Group Purchasing Organizations (GPOs) can compound the problem, claims McCord. “For manufacturers, GPOs and traditional trade programs function more like a tax than a growth investment, with blanket discounting, painful manual administration, slow execution, and delayed settlements.”
Put simply, he says, foodservice trade spend is “stuck in the dark ages.”
Payment in days, not weeks
First Bite’s rebates platform seeks to bring transparency, speed, and efficiency to the process by enabling manufacturers to run “precise, high-performance programs with full visibility from incentive to purchase,” says McCord. “Our customers can now target any operator in the country, deliver offers directly to decision makers, and attribute sales back to those operators, all in one place, with just a few clicks.”
Using the platform, First Bite users can create digital rebate programs in minutes, process and pay them in “days, not weeks or months,” and track clicks, claims, redemptions, and attribution on a dashboard in real time.
It’s early days, says McCord, but redemption rates are three times higher than legacy programs.
The visibility gap
Launched by McCord in 2023 and emerging from stealth in early 2024 with $2m in seed funding, First Bite enables food manufacturers to reach more than 1.5 million foodservice locations across the US spanning restaurants, schools, healthcare, colleges, and hotels.
A software as a service (SaaS) platform, it uses online menus, reviews, social media data, location data, demographic data, contact data, and other publicly available information to provide market data on these outlets enabling manufacturers to engage in highly targeted sales, marketing and account management in a channel that can sometimes seem like a black box.
Today, over 50 manufacturers who collectively manage over $800 million in foodservice commerce use the platform, says McCord, who says revenue has grown six-fold since the seed round in Feb 2024.
“We’re here to address two main challenges in foodservice. One is the visibility gap, as distributors don’t share data with suppliers and control operator relationships. The second is workflow.”
The long tail of foodservice
In retail, says McCord, “Maybe there are 500 buyers who matter.” In foodservice, “there are a million decision makers” at thousands of Mom & Pop operators, which creates huge challenges from a workflow perspective.
“We’ve built a full featured CRM that already has everybody’s customer in it. We’ve built workflow tools so you can select a group of operators, we’ll tell you the decision maker, give you their contact information, and you can run in-platform email campaigns and automated campaigns to connect with those folks.
“The rebate piece then closes the loop, so you can create an offer inside of the platform, directly deliver that to operators, and track redemptions to see what’s actually driving revenue, all in one place.”
He adds: “Maybe you want to use First Bite to find every high traffic restaurant in Colorado serving tacos that has a strong social media presence, find all the decision makers, and send them a targeted offer that will create new business?”
In another scenario, he says, you could use the platform to identify outlets that already sell your product and offer them a deal to reward their loyalty.
According to McCord, who says First Bite is “already close to profitability,” most of his business has come from word of mouth, with the sweet spot being companies with CPG brands that “want to take a hands-on approach to driving growth in foodservice.”
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