Field note · September 2026

Reorder Velocity Beats Novelty

Walk the floor of a specialty food show and every brand is pitching the same word: unique. A flavor no one's seen, a format no one's tried, a story no one's heard. It's the right instinct for getting a buyer to stop at the booth. It's the wrong instinct for what actually gets a product onto a US distributor's line card and kept there.

A distributor isn't placing a one-time order. They're underwriting a relationship — warehouse space, a sales team's attention, a spot in a catalog that competes with thousands of other SKUs. What they're actually evaluating isn't how novel the product is at first taste. It's whether the case that sells this month sells again next month, and the month after that, without the distributor having to manufacture demand for it themselves.

This is why brands that dazzle at a trade show and then quietly disappear from shelves within two quarters aren't unusual — they're the median outcome. Novelty gets the first order. Reorder velocity is the only thing that gets the second one, and the second order is the one that actually pays for the warehouse slot.

The trade show measures who gets noticed. The reorder measures who gets kept.

What outsiders miss is that this changes what a strong pitch to a distributor should even emphasize. A brand with real evidence of repeat purchase — a regional retailer that reordered twice, a direct-to-consumer channel with return customers — is a safer bet than a brand with a more exciting flavor profile and no purchase history at all. Distributors know this even when brands pitching them don't.

That's the filter I run before making an introduction: not who has the most interesting product, but who has the evidence that people buy it more than once. It's a less flattering question to ask a founder than "what makes you different," but it's the one that actually predicts whether the match holds.

— Kumari Sikha Singh, on where I route between foreign brand and US importer