How Mable Is Aiming To Ease Early-Stage Distribution Struggles

One tech company is looking to make drop-ship distribution a viable model for early-stage brands to scale up.

Mable was originally designed as a “double-sided marketplace” to help independent grocers procure food and beverage products from emerging brands and small, regional businesses. Over the past four years, the tech platform has grown beyond its roots in the independent retail space and recently activated its first major partnership with grocery and foodservice distributor McLane.

Through McLane’s new Emerging Brands program, powered by Mable, brands selling on the platform can now opt in to receive orders from any retailer in McLane’s network.The brand still handles its own fulfillment, but the marketplace platform opens up access to a greater number of retail partners.

“From a brand perspective, reaching countless stores throughout the country would be near impossible without a sales team or large national distribution, both of which are quite cost prohibitive for a smaller brand,” explained Kendra Bennett, CMO of Bon Bee Honey, which has been selling on Mable since September 2020. “We’ve all been working in silos, brands limited to our own geographic locations, retailers limited to what is carried by their distributor, and distributors limited to large brands that can afford mass distribution.”

Bennett claims that Mable’s model has connected retailers and brands in “an unprecedented way” that allows for greater discovery in the procurement process and easy, direct-order fulfillment. The platform has also allowed Bon Bee to diversify its channel strategy, she said, and catalyzed its DTC business due to the greater exposure.

Maine-based Better With Buckwheat, formerly The Maine Crisp Company, has also used the platform to diversify its channel strategy. According to CEO Lewis Goldstein, the platform has allowed them to sell to everything from a small Northeastern chain of gas stations, to Lamplighter Brewing which operates multiple locations across Boston.

“Mable is an integral part of our strategy to offer our products to specialty retailers, foodservice and retailers that are looking to explore selling higher-margin premium products to their customers,” Goldstein said. “Ultimately we want to offer our Better With Buckwheat Maine Crisps and Snacking Crackers to retailers and restaurants on the platform they want to use, and Mable is one of those platforms that generates invaluable distribution and profitable sales.”

What’s the backstory?

Mable’s creation traces back to founder Arik Keller’s purchase of a “run-down” independent grocery store in 2018. As he worked to revive the shop and its assortment, he found it extremely difficult to source from small suppliers through existing mainline distribution providers. That led him to create Mable which grew to allow “a couple of thousand stores around the country to buy from a couple thousand brands.”

But as time went on, Keller said Mable was “fighting upstream” by not engaging with larger logistics providers. “It wasn’t that we ever thought we were going to disintermediate or displace distributors,” he emphasized, but by not tapping their retail networks, the platform’s had limited scale.

The company first expanded beyond independents with Alltown Fresh, a 20-location chain of chef-driven convenience stores across the Northeast that wanted to be able to shop brands available on Mable, through its existing procurement portals. In short, it was looking for Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) connectivity so it wouldn’t have to toggle between different platforms to order items for its stores.

Keller realigned the ecommerce marketplace so it could be integrated to a retailer’s existing ordering systems while still allowing the process to be carried out in a “pure drop-ship manner” by the brands, he explained. That EDI connectivity ended up garnering higher retention and more successful implementation within larger chains and also led to an integration with DoorDash.

In addition to the McLane, DoorDash and Alltown Fresh partnerships, Mable is also working to add a handful of new marketplaces to its roster including a “top three foodservice distributor” as well as a specialty grocer in the next few months. Mable’s marketplace allows retailers to sort by region, state, categories as well as diets and brand values.

How does it work?

Brands onboard with Mable’s platform for a one-time fee that ranges from $500 to $1,000. The fee goes primarily into data management, Keller explained, including maintaining product catalogs and information in the distributors’ and larger retailers’ systems. There is another nominal fee for joining distributor-specific marketplaces like the new McLane Emerging Brands program, he added.

New brands are often invited by distributors or retailers, Keller explained. The technology allows brands to work with these partners, but avoid the cost and time of onboarding. Keller described Mable’s current role in the distribution process as being a “low-risk” way to work with distributors that alleviates the upstart pressure and costs for small brands and acts as a “virtual warehouse extension” for logistics providers.

“As food brands scale they really have to work with distributors… and so many brands we’ve talked to have been burned by that process,” Keller said. “They get brought in early, [and] the contracts that exist between brands and distributors can be pretty strong, favoring the distributor.”

A big interest factor for brands: the drop-ship model eliminates the possibility of chargebacks and other fees that can often be the death of small brands. There are also no order minimums, meaning a retailer can order a single case to a single store, or many across multiple locations.

Keller emphasized that most of the businesses selling on Mable are not ready to support distribution to tens of thousands of stores; they have the means to incrementally scale up, and this program allows them to get the momentum to do so. The hope is that as retailers see strong velocity from a product or brand, that they “graduate” from Mable’s platform into the traditional warehouse-distribution system.

“We’ve heard distributors acknowledge the challenges that they have brought in brands too early before… this program can help ultimately eliminate that problem.”