How FE Ingredients cross-sells 2,000 products to the right accounts

Flour and sugar, on the truck every day

FE Ingredients has distributed bakery ingredients from Vaughan, Ontario since 1984: flour, sugar, oils and shortening, seeds and spices, mixes, starch and yeast. Its customers are commercial bakeries, other distributors and street bakeries. It runs its own fleet of 18 tractor-trailers, each doing three runs a day.

Leading the program

Adam Levinson

VP Sales, FE Ingredients

In the role	Since 2023
Background	10+ years selling in food distribution, logistics and software
Based in	Toronto
The goal	More units from the accounts FE Ingredients already serves

2,000 products. 750 accounts. No team can match that by hand.

FE Ingredients' customers buy flour and sugar every day. Most also use chocolate, cocoa, dairy powder and fats, which FE Ingredients stocks too. The catalogue runs to about 2,000 items, and about 50 of them make up roughly 90% of what goes out.

• Too many combinations to track. Knowing which of 2,000 items each account should add next is more than any rep can keep in their head.
• A team built to open new accounts. Sales is focused on new doors, not on working the accounts already ordering.
• One push at a time. “If we need to really move something, we do it one at a time… It'd be great to not do that and have multiple things working at the same time.”
• Buyers nobody sells to. “People who are buying this product aren't used to being sold to.”

An AI agent on every account

FE Ingredients is starting with the first 250 of its 750 accounts. Each one gets its own agent, with messages reviewed by people before they go out. The agents work from a daily export of FE Ingredients' Sage sales data, so each one knows what its account buys and what it doesn't.

• Asks for the next item. The SKU-expansion playbook finds what an account should be buying and isn't, then asks.
• Only where it fits. Chocolate goes to bakeries that use chocolate, not to every account on the list.
• FE Ingredients' team makes the calls. When an account needs a phone call, the agent flags it and FE Ingredients' own people pick up the phone.
• Orders land the way they always have. By email, one of the ways FE Ingredients already takes orders. Nothing new for the customer to learn.

That last point is deliberate. FE Ingredients once rolled out an online ordering platform and dropped it because customers didn't want it. “I need to build tech around our customers' habits, rather than push tech to our customers,” Adam Levinson says.

How the playbook reads an account Example, not a real account

Buys flour and sugar · no chocolate yetAgent asks · FE's team calls