Score your suppliers on more than price
A simple scorecard for restaurant suppliers: fill rate, substitutions, accuracy and price stability alongside cost.
Two produce suppliers quote within 2% of each other. Supplier A fills 97% of lines complete; B fills 84% and substitutes silently. The gap between them isn't in their quotes — it's in the taxi rides to the cash-and-carry every time B misses. A scorecard converts that frustration into numbers you can show, track, and act on.
Choosing metrics that matter
- Fill rate. Percentage of ordered lines delivered complete. Every miss costs you a scramble.
- Substitution honesty. Did swaps arrive flagged and agreed, or discovered at prep time?
- Invoice accuracy. Wrong weights, phantom items, stale prices — each one poisons variance tracking.
- Price stability. How often did unit prices move without notice? Volatility costs planning time.
- Delivery punctuality matters only if it constrains your prep window; skip it otherwise.
A worked example
Twelve weeks of deliveries scored per supplier across four dimensions, each weighted by how much it costs you when it fails.
| Produce Co | fill 97% · subs flagged 100% · invoice errors 1 · price moves announced 2/2 | 9.1 / 10 |
|---|---|---|
| GreenFarms | fill 84% · subs flagged 40% · invoice errors 6 · price moves announced 0/5 | 6.3 / 10 |
GreenFarms quoted 2% less. With substitution-driven emergency purchases counted, they effectively cost more — and the scorecard shows exactly why.
Interactive example · price spread
Spread between your highest and lowest quoted unit price: €6.30 (€39.90 → €46.20). Compare the quoted prices with each supplier. This is a price difference, not a savings projection.
Running the review
- 1Log incidents as they happen. Thirty seconds per problem delivery, noted while packing. Reconstructing twelve weeks from memory produces fiction.
- 2Compute scores quarterly. Four numbers per supplier, weighted simply (e.g. fill ×3, subs ×2, invoices ×2, stability ×2). Fancy math adds nothing.
- 3Share results with each supplier. Good suppliers want this feedback and will fix processes. Silence protects nobody but the problems.
- 4Tie scores to volume decisions. Growing accounts go to high scorers. Trials for challengers get defined success criteria from the same table.
FAQ
- How is this different from just remembering who's reliable?
- Memory overweights recent drama. Scores accumulate all quarter, so a single disaster doesn't erase months of quiet competence — and chronic small failures can't hide behind charm.
- Do I need special software?
- No. A shared note per supplier works. What matters is logging at delivery time and reviewing on schedule; tools only make the habit harder to skip.
- Won't scoring strain supplier relationships?
- Sharing honest scores strengthens them. Vendors get few structured signals from kitchens; the ones who care use them, and the ones who don't were going to disappoint you eventually anyway.
- Which metric reveals hidden cost fastest?
- Substitutions that aren't flagged. They surface at prep time when your options are worst — every unannounced swap carries a premium somewhere else.
Keep reading
- Compare prices across the suppliers you already use
A fair comparison framework for recurring restaurant products and current suppliers.
- Catch invoice line-price drift before it eats your margin
Compare each invoice line against expected unit prices and act on real variances, not noise.
- Consolidate suppliers without losing leverage
When merging volume with fewer restaurant suppliers helps — and when it quietly costs you money.
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