Micucci Wholesale Grocers
Portland, ME

Customer Profile
Back in 1952 Bruce Micucci’s father started the business by going door to door selling all types of Italian food products. In those days there were many Italian immigrants who found the selection of Italian food ingredients in the northern states, extremely lacking. So his dad set out to supply the growing Italian customer base with ingredients that were just as good as the ones they found back home in Italy. More than 54 years later they are now a premium distributor of Mediterranean Specialty Foods and a proud member of Bellisimo Foods, a nationwide association of Italian specialty foodservice distributors, servicing approximately 650 customers nationwide with their specialty products. They have been using FoodConnex since 2006.

Business Challenge
As Micucci Wholesale grew, they found it a challenge to find a software that could keep up with the fast past growth of their business. Bruce Micucci explains, “We had been online for over 15 years, prior to becoming a FoodConnex user, but we were struggling with an old DOS based system. The obvious problem for us was that the system was so outdated that it wasn’t being serviced anymore by our provider and the upkeep for the old system was proving to be nearly impossible.”

Bruce started to research different other software vendors and couldn’t find anything that really met their growing needs. They all seemed the same. “As we evaluated different vendors we discovered that they all seemed exactly the same, it was extremely hard for us to differentiate between what each one claimed to provide. When we discovered FoodConnex we immediately identified with what made it different from the rest and what it had to offer us. Not only could the software handle the major business capabilities but also the smaller things that were a drain on us that the big software suppliers were lacking. Plus our old system was more of a graphical based interface and FoodConnex’s character based interface seemed much more user friendly to us.”

Our Solution
Bruce continues, “Just a year ago if someone told me I could send my sales people out with laptops that could connect real time to our warehouse miles away I wouldn’t have believed it. But with FoodConnex we can do just that and it’s been a tremendous asset to our sales team.”

“Once we switched from our old system to FoodConnex the technology advancements exceeded all our expectations, even in the short period of time we’ve been customers. The purchasing module gives us a ten week cycle of average purchases that we use all the time to eliminate back orders and out of stocks. We noticed within the first month that we were eliminating many of the problems we had been dealing with before.”

“Being a relatively brand new customer, as we learned more about new features of the software, we sometimes have to contact the FoodConnex support staff. They always get back to our emails and phone calls very quickly with the correct answer. They did a wonderful job training us and getting the software up and running. Even though we are based in Portland, Maine and they are miles away in Pennsylvania, location has never been an issue. And it’s their real-time problem solving that has mattered the most.”

Positive Business Results
“We can now maintain our stock levels of core products like never before. We were even able to drop our inventory by 10% because FoodConnex finally allows us to do a much more focused job of ordering what we need when we need it. The weekly averages reports has helped us pinpoint exactly when to order additional products and when not to. The money savings from this have been more then we ever bargained for. Ordering exactly what we need when we need it has been a godsend. Even our Accounts Receivables have been much more detailed and with all the information we have from the system we can quickly establish when certain things are going haywire before they get out of hand. I didn’t expect the initial savings we experienced. You know everyone claims that they will save you this and decrease that but the savings with FoodConnex are 100% real.”

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