Extract discovery insights

To: Chief Product Officer From: Product Manager, Ordering Subject: Q4 Product Strategy Synthesis: Debunking the Marketplace Hypothesis

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Executive Summary

The recommendation in the draft synthesis—to build a supplier marketplace—is based on a misinterpretation of support data and interview signals.

A closer analysis reveals that demand for a discovery marketplace is weak. Instead, the data reveals a critical, systemic gap in our core product: delivery verification and invoice reconciliation. Restaurants are losing hundreds of pounds monthly and spending hours manually reconciling short deliveries, substitutions, and incorrect invoices.

Next quarter, we should not build a marketplace. We should build an end-to-end delivery check-in and automated reconciliation workflow.

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Key Findings & Evidence Strength

#### 1. Demand for a "Supplier Marketplace" is an artifact of a single customer * Finding: Customers are not asking for supplier discovery. What looks like our highest-volume ticket category is heavily skewed by one account, and the few requests for "more suppliers" reflect a desire to bring existing suppliers onto Larder, not discover new ones. * Evidence Strength: High (Quantitative & Qualitative) * Ticket Skew: "Add more suppliers" represents 75 of 200 tickets (37.5%). However, 58 of those 75 tickets (77%) were submitted by a single customer: Calder Group (14 sites), repeatedly requesting onboarding for four specific existing vendors (Brakes, meat, dairy, wine). * Only 17 other accounts (out of 1,140 total accounts, ~1.5%) submitted requests in this category. * Interviews: Only 1 of 10 respondents (Pizzeria) actively asked for a marketplace for choice/pricing. In contrast, multi-site operators explicitly stated: "Finding suppliers isn't the problem. Knowing what actually arrived is" (Café group) and "I'd use a marketplace if it existed, I suppose. But day to day, what kills me is the paperwork" (Tapas bar). Even Calder Group’s interview makes clear their goal is centralizing their existing supply base onto one system.

#### 2. The critical operational pain is post-order delivery check-in and invoice reconciliation * Finding: Restaurants face daily operational chaos and margin loss between order placement and invoice payment. Deliveries arrive short or substituted, chefs lack a frictionless way to record discrepancies, and finance teams waste days chasing credit notes. * Evidence Strength: Very High (Triangulated across support & interviews) * Support Tickets: Combined, Delivery didn't match order (34 tickets) and Invoice reconciliation (29 tickets) account for 63 tickets across ~60 distinct accounts—nearly 4x the unique account breadth of general supplier requests. Core sub-issues include: "Invoice includes items not delivered", "Short delivery not shown in app", "Credit note missing", and "Export for accountant doesn't show credits". * Interviews: 8 out of 10 interviewees cited this as their primary operational bottleneck. The impact is acute and financial: * Direct losses: Gastropub lost ~£600 last month paying for unchecked deliveries; Steakhouse pays unmatched invoices due to lack of time. * Wasted admin: Hotel finance team spends days chasing credit notes; Bistro owner spends Sundays matching notes with highlighters; Noodle bar re-types paper notes into the app. * Dispute friction: Bakery notes supplier disputes are "my word against theirs."

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What This Means for Next Quarter

Building a two-sided marketplace would require massive operational lift (supplier acquisition, vetting, liquidity) while failing to solve the core retention and efficiency problems of our existing 1,140 accounts.

Instead, we must complete our core product loop: Order $\rightarrow$ Receive $\rightarrow$ Reconcile.

#### Next Quarter Roadmap Priorities

1. P0: Mobile/Tablet Delivery Check-In Flow * Problem solved: Staff currently check goods on paper clipboards or sign blindly. * Feature: Fast, touch-friendly check-in workflow at the delivery door. Staff can mark line items as accepted, short, rejected, or substituted, with photo capture for damaged goods.

2. P1: Discrepancy & Credit Note Tracking * Problem solved: Finance teams manually chase suppliers for credit notes; owners lack proof of short deliveries. * Feature: Automatically generate and email a discrepancy report to the supplier upon delivery check-in, creating an audit trail and tracking outstanding credit notes until resolved.

3. P2: 3-Way Invoice Reconciliation & Accounting Export * Problem solved: Invoices don't match orders, and exports fail to reflect credits. * Feature: Match PO $\rightarrow$ Delivery Note $\rightarrow$ Final Invoice. Highlight variances automatically and update accounting exports to include verified credits.

4. Fast-Follow / Targeted: Self-Serve Supplier Onboarding Portal * Problem solved: Satisfies Calder Group and similar multi-site accounts wanting their off-platform suppliers integrated. * Feature: A lightweight "Invite Supplier" flow where restaurants send an onboarding link directly to their existing vendors to set up a digital catalog.

Next-quarter synthesis: prioritise delivery-to-invoice accuracy, not a marketplace

Recommendation: Build and validate a focused workflow for recording what arrived, flagging discrepancies and resolving invoice/credit issues. Continue targeted supplier onboarding, but do not commit next quarter to a broad marketplace. The evidence supports operational accuracy more broadly than supplier discovery.

Main findings and evidence strength

1. Supplier requests lead ticket volume—but are heavily concentrated in one account

The export contains 200 tickets:

Account counts are deduplicated within categories; they should not be summed across categories.

Calder Group generated 58 of the 75 supplier tickets (77%), repeatedly requesting onboarding for four named suppliers or supplier types. The other 17 supplier tickets came from 17 accounts.

Evidence strength: Strong evidence of a concentrated supplier-coverage need; weak evidence that a marketplace is the right solution. Ticket volume measures support demand, not independent customer votes. Repeated requests may indicate an important unresolved problem, but not broad market demand.

Calder’s 14 sites and stated willingness to move all ordering to Larder warrant commercial follow-up. However, this is a conditional intention—not a commitment—and we have no revenue or order-volume evidence to size the opportunity. Requests to add existing suppliers must also be distinguished from discovering new ones.

2. Delivery and invoice problems affect a broader set of accounts

Together, delivery discrepancies and invoice reconciliation account for 63 tickets from 62 distinct accounts, compared with supplier requests from 18 accounts.

The interviews reinforce this pattern. Eight of ten excerpts describe delivery, reconciliation or paperwork pain, although the tapas bar’s comment is less specific. Examples include:

• Discovering a short delivery only when the invoice arrives.
• Paying for undelivered goods; one gastropub reported approximately £600 in one month.
• Chasing credit notes weekly.
• Having no shared evidence when suppliers dispute shortages.
• Recording deliveries on paper, then re-entering them in Larder.

The café group explicitly says finding suppliers is not the problem; knowing what arrived is.

Evidence strength: Strong convergence across these two sources that this is a meaningful problem spanning multiple restaurant formats. Evidence for its prevalence across all 1,140 accounts, typical financial impact or the best solution remains limited. The £600 figure is one customer’s report, not an estimate we can extrapolate.

3. Marketplace interest exists, but “most customers want one” is unsupported

The pizzeria strongly wants more choice and better prices. Calder explicitly mentions a marketplace, but frames its need as getting every supplier onto the platform. The tapas bar expresses tentative interest, then prioritises paperwork.

Evidence strength: Directional evidence for supplier expansion, but weak evidence for broad marketplace demand. Only Calder explicitly advocates a marketplace; the pizzeria’s desired outcome could potentially be served in other ways. These excerpts do not establish expected adoption, switching behaviour or willingness to pay.

What we should build next quarter

Prioritise a narrow delivery-to-invoice pilot, rather than attempting full reconciliation automation immediately:

1. Capture actual receipt against an order: quantities received, shortages and substitutions, without duplicate entry.
2. Carry discrepancies forward: make them visible when checking invoices rather than leaving users to reconstruct events.
3. Track resolution: preserve a discrepancy record and show outstanding supplier responses or credits.

Start with observing receiving and invoice-checking in a varied set of independent restaurants. In particular, test whether busy staff will actually record discrepancies: the unchecked delivery-note example suggests software alone may not solve the problem.

Measure receiving-workflow adoption, duplicate entry, reconciliation time, discrepancies identified before payment and time to resolve credits. Establish baselines before setting numerical success targets; use pilot results to decide how far to expand.

Keep supplier coverage as a separate, bounded workstream. Clarify Calder’s required suppliers, onboarding feasibility and commercial commitment. Test targeted onboarding before assuming we need marketplace discovery, comparison and transaction capabilities.

Confidence and limits: This is a prioritisation recommendation, not a proven business case. Ten interview excerpts and self-selected support tickets cannot establish population prevalence. Some accounts also have inconsistent site counts in the export, so site-weighted conclusions would be unreliable. Validate the proposed workflow and its value before a broad rollout.

Synthesis: what customers are telling us

Headline: Our biggest problem is that customers can't easily check what arrived against what they were invoiced. A supplier marketplace is a real but narrow request, concentrated in one large account. I don't recommend building it next quarter.

Sources: 10 owner and manager interviews (September) and 200 support tickets from last quarter (LT-5000 to LT-5199).

What changed from the draft: "Top category by far" holds only because of one account. "Most customers we spoke to want a marketplace" is 2 of 10, and one of those is hedged. The recommendation doesn't follow from the evidence.

Findings

1. Checking deliveries and reconciling invoices is the main pain. Evidence: strong. - 63 of 200 tickets (32%) are "delivery didn't match order" or "invoice reconciliation." The most common issues are short deliveries not shown in the app, missing credit notes, invoices including items not delivered, invoices that can't be matched to orders, and accountant exports that omit credits. - These tickets come from many different accounts, not one. - 8 of 10 interviews describe this problem. A gastropub lost about £600 in a month paying for unchecked deliveries. A hotel finance team chases credit notes weekly. A bakery is in a "my word against theirs" dispute with a supplier. A noodle bar re-types clipboard checks into the app. - Caveats: ticket categories are assigned by support staff, and 10 interviews is a small sample.

2. Supplier demand is concentrated in one account. Evidence: strong for Calder Group, weak as a base-wide signal. - "Add more suppliers" is the largest ticket category (75 tickets), but 58 come from Calder Group (14 sites). Outside Calder it is 17 tickets, fewer than delivery issues (34) or ordering issues (31). - Calder's requests repeat four named suppliers: Brakes (15 tickets), meat (15), dairy (14), and a wine merchant (14). These are four specific onboarding requests, not a general need for a marketplace. - Outside Calder, requests are vague ("any plans for more suppliers?", "would like more produce suppliers"), spread across accounts. - In interviews, 2 of 10 want more suppliers: the pizzeria and Calder. A tapas bar says it would use a marketplace "I suppose," but says the paperwork is what hurts day to day. A café group says finding suppliers "isn't the problem. Knowing what actually arrived is."

3. Calder Group is a high-value but conditional signal. Evidence: one account, one conversation. - Calder says: "If you had a marketplace, we'd move all our ordering to you." That is the strongest commercial statement in the material, but it is one customer's conditional view, and it depends on four specific suppliers. - We don't know from these materials how much ordering volume or revenue Calder represents.

4. Ordering and login tickets are routine. Evidence: moderate, low priority. - Ordering (31) and login (31) tickets are mostly specific fixes: cut-off times, duplicate orders, delivery-day changes, tablet login problems, password resets, adding users. None of these came up in interviews.

What this means for next quarter

Build: a receiving and invoice-matching workflow. This addresses the largest and most widely shared problem. - Let staff record received quantities at delivery, with shorts and substitutions flagged in the app. This covers the short-delivery tickets and "how do I record a substitution?" - Automatically match invoices to deliveries and orders, and flag differences before payment. This covers "can't match," "total differs," and "includes items not delivered." - Show credit notes against deliveries and in the accountant export. Fixing the export that omits credits could ship early as a quick win. - Measures: the 63-ticket category volume, and credit value recovered per account, which we can ask customers to report.

Don't build the marketplace next quarter. Instead: - Talk to Calder Group about their ordering volume and what they'd need to move everything to us. Check whether onboarding Brakes, their meat supplier, dairy, and the wine merchant is feasible as partnership or integration work. That is a much smaller decision than building a platform. - Add a "request a supplier" flow so demand from the wider base is captured in a structured way. Then we can see whether requests extend beyond Calder. - Triage the ordering and login tickets into the backlog as small fixes.

What would change my view

• A clear rise in supplier requests from accounts other than Calder.
• Around 20 more interviews, across account sizes and including some churned customers, where supplier access is named as the blocker.
• Evidence that Calder's ordering value justifies the integrations, or that a marketplace would win or retain several accounts of Calder's scale.

Until then, the evidence supports fixing receiving and reconciliation first, and treating the supplier question as a targeted account decision rather than a platform bet.