Central Kitchen B2B Ordering: How to Give Every Branch and External Clients the Right Catalogue and Prices

A central kitchen can hand each of its customers, every internal branch and every outside client, its own ordering catalogue at its own prices, and bring twenty of them online in a single import. Each customer sees only what it is allowed to order, pays the rate set for its group, and places orders itself, while the kitchen keeps one clean view of who ordered what.

Most central kitchens do not start there. They start by running branch and client orders through a point-of-sale system or a shared spreadsheet that was never built to tell one customer apart from another. A six-venue group whose central kitchen made around 135 packaged products for its own sites had no real central-kitchen tooling at all, so its operations lead pushed every order through the till system, with no way to give one branch a different list or a different price from the next. That is the gap this workflow closes. Supy treats the central kitchen as a supplier in its own right, an extension of the same orders and requisitions flow your branches already use: branches order from the kitchen, the kitchen confirms, ships and invoices them, and the same machinery serves external business-to-business (B2B) clients on their own price lists.

Why One Shared Catalogue Breaks the Moment You Add a Second Customer

Per-customer catalogue control means deciding, for each customer, exactly which items appear when they go to order. Adding an item restores it to that customer's list; excluding it takes it away. The change applies to that one customer and touches no one else, so a branch and an outside client can draw from the same master catalogue and still see completely different things.

The moment you serve more than one customer from one shared list, that list becomes a liability. A branch orders a semi-finished product meant only for another site. A wholesale client sees an item you never intended to sell them. Every mistake becomes a phone call, a correction, or a credit. With per-customer control, the kitchen curates each list once: the flagship branch sees its 140 items, a corner cafe client sees its 45, a small bakery client sees its 32, all pulled from a 210-item master catalogue. Nobody orders what they should not, because they never see it.

Onboarding a Batch of New Branches Without a Day of Data Entry

Bulk customer creation brings many customers onto the system in one step instead of adding them one at a time. When a group opens sites or signs new wholesale accounts, the kitchen imports the whole batch at once rather than keying in each name, code, and contact by hand.

Bringing customers live then means inviting their contacts, and a bulk re-invite is careful about it: it only messages contacts who have not yet accepted, and skips anyone already active. Send a round of ten invites where six contacts are already connected, and only the four outstanding ones are contacted; the six live connections are left untouched. Enabling the central-kitchen B2B workflow runs the underlying setup for you, so standing up branch-to-kitchen and client-to-kitchen ordering is a switch you turn on, not a manual configuration you assemble step by step.

Charging the Franchise Partner and the Wholesale Client Differently

Customer groups let you sort customers into segments and give each segment its own price list. Your own branches sit in one group priced at cost plus 12%, franchise partners in another at cost plus 18%, and outside wholesale clients on a fixed price list. Filter to any one group and you can view or act on all of it at once, rather than opening customers one by one.

This is where a central kitchen stops being a cost centre and starts behaving like a business. The same sourdough loaf can leave the kitchen at $2.10 for an internal branch and $2.85 for a wholesale client, because pricing follows the group, not the item. Billing runs off the same structure: pro forma and tax invoices, cost, markup or fixed pricing, and statements of account per customer. When a franchise partner questions a charge, the price they pay is a rule you set once for their group, not a number someone typed on the day.

Letting Central Kitchen Customers Order for Themselves Without Losing Control

Supy Connect is a dedicated ordering app your external B2B customers use to browse your live catalogue and place their own orders. Those orders flow straight into your operator portal, customers view and download their own invoices, and you decide who gets access. It is built for outside clients, not internal branch ordering, so it opens the kitchen to wholesale accounts without opening your back office to them.

Control does not stop at the order. You can find any customer instantly by display name, internal code, or legal name, because all three are searched at once and you rarely have every identifier to hand. When finance needs the customer list, it exports with currency and time formatting already applied, so it lands as a file people can use rather than one they have to reformat. And when a client relationship ends, deactivating that customer removes them from every working view while keeping their full order history intact, so the audit trail is preserved and nothing is lost.

Start by separating your customers from your master catalogue: list every branch and outside client you supply, then decide which slice of the full item list each one should actually see. That single exercise, done once, is what makes every later step, pricing, onboarding, and self-service ordering, fall into place. It is also the foundation the rest of your central kitchen management software builds on.

When you assess a system for this, ask to see three things in a demo. Add and remove one item for a single customer and confirm no other customer changes. Put two customers on two different price lists and order the same product from each. Then place a live order from the customer app and watch it arrive in the operator portal. If all three work in front of you, your central kitchen can run B2B ordering as a real supplier, not a workaround bolted onto a till.