Who we serve
Margin recovery for food distributors
You run on 2-3% net margin. The points leak in four places: quotes priced from memory, orders rekeyed by hand, stock nobody checked in time, and promotions nobody measured. Tribu closes all four — inside WhatsApp, email and voice, the tools your team already uses.
Where the margin goes
None of this is a technology problem. It is four decisions a day that nobody has time to make properly.
You don't know how high you are
Your price-sensitive accounts — the hotels, the casinos, the ones who spreadsheet you — compare you line by line. Sometimes they show you the competing quote. Usually they just say you're high, and you guess by how much.
Pricing eats your most expensive people
Two thousand SKUs moving daily, sometimes hourly. A hundred and fifty formulas by customer and by SKU. One California distributor described his VP of Sales as caught in paralysis through analysis, and his own time on it as a time suck.
Orders arrive everywhere
EDI and the web portal for the customers who adopted them. Email, WhatsApp and voicemail for everyone else. Two accounts still faxing. Every channel outside the portal gets rekeyed by hand, and every rekey is a chance to drop a line.
Nobody measures the promotion
You discount to hold an account, then move on. Weeks later the volume did or didn't come back, and the reporting to tell the difference takes an IT request nobody files.
The arithmetic
Distributors between $20M and $200M in revenue run on 2-3% net margin. That number came up independently in three separate conversations we had with investors and operators in this industry. It means a single point of gross margin recovered is not a rounding error — it moves net profit by a third to a half.
That is arithmetic, not a claim about our software. It is also why margin is the only number worth optimising in this business.
1 point of gross margin ≈ 33-50% of net profit
How it works
It sits on top of your ERP
Produce Pro, Sage, AS400, NetSuite — Tribu reads from it and writes back to it. No migration, no rip and replace, no eighteen-month implementation.
It watches the channels you already use
WhatsApp, email, SMS and voice. Your reps keep selling the way they sell. Nothing to log into, no change management, no new habit to enforce.
It prices the line, not just the order
Live costs, this customer's history, your margin floor, and what the market did this morning — applied to every line, then tracked so you can see whether the decision worked.
Questions we get asked
- Do we have to replace our ERP?
- No. Tribu is a decision layer that sits on top of the ERP you already run. We read your data and write approved decisions back. Distributors on Produce Pro, Sage and AS400 all work the same way.
- Our reps have no pricing authority. Does that break this?
- No, and it is a common setup — plenty of distributors control pricing centrally and would never let a rep move a number. Tribu routes suggestions to whoever actually holds the authority, whether that is one owner or a pricing committee.
- How do you get competitor pricing?
- Mostly from conversations your team is already having. When a buyer says a competitor is fifty cents cheaper, that lives in a text thread and never reaches a pricing decision. We capture it, and we check it against what that customer actually buys — which tells you when the quote was real and when it was a bluff.
- Do you work in Spanish?
- Yes. A large share of independent distribution in California, Texas and Florida runs in Spanish, in WhatsApp groups, and no US competitor sells into it. We do.
- What does a margin audit involve?
- You send one messy week of orders and invoices. We show you where margin leaked and what would have been caught. It costs nothing and you keep the analysis whether or not you work with us.
Bring us one messy week of orders and invoices
We'll show you where the margin is leaking and what Tribu would have caught — before you commit to anything.
We also work with manufacturers and cpg brands. Seeing more than one tier of the same supply chain is how we spot what a single view misses.