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Selling Food From the Heart: How To Build Trust and Grow Case Sales
Paperback
Publisher: Selling from the Heart
Published: Jul 30 2026
Pages: 82
Weight: 0.23
Height: 0.17 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
Six reps call on the same restaurant every single week. Only one gets trusted. This book shows you how to be that one.
You know the grind. You walk through the back door of a restaurant kitchen at 6 a.m., dodge prep cooks and dish racks, and try to get five minutes with a buyer who has already been pitched by three competitors before breakfast. You quote. They counter. Someone undercuts you by a nickel a case, and an account you spent months building disappears without a phone call.
Here is the hard truth no one told you when you started in wholesale food sales: the product is never your competitive advantage. Every competitor can source similar tomatoes, similar chicken breasts, similar olive oil. They can match your pricing within pennies. The product has been commoditized. You are the only thing that cannot be.
Selling Food From The Heart is the first book written specifically for wholesale food salespeople - the reps, route drivers, DSMs, and sales leaders who feed America's restaurants, hotels, hospitals, and caterers. Drawing on the principles of the bestselling Selling From The Heart and applying them to the unique pressures of food distribution, Larry Levine delivers a practical operating system for building the kind of trust that no GPO can negotiate away and no competitor can undercut.
Inside, you will discover:
- The Trust Formula - a concrete equation that turns authentic relationships and meaningful value into durable, price-resistant accounts
- The three pillars - Heart Set, Mindset, and Skill Set - and how to develop each one in the context of kitchen-door selling
- Why 42% of restaurant operators are running unprofitable businesses - and how understanding their financial reality transforms you from order taker to indispensable partner
- The Empty Suit trap - how most reps unknowingly train their buyers to see every salesperson as a commodity, and exactly how to break free
- Business acumen that changes everything - menu engineering, food cost analysis, supply chain intelligence, and labor dynamics that make buyers lean in instead of tuning out
- The Follow-Through Gap - the single discipline that separates trusted partners from forgotten reps, and a simple system to close it
- How to sell value when every competitor is selling price - a three-layer value framework built for the realities of wholesale food
Each chapter opens with a real story from the field - a produce rep who helped break down chicken thighs beside her buyer at dawn, a dairy salesperson who lost everything to broken promises, a veteran who rebuilt her career by asking one question no rep had ever asked. These are not hypotheticals. This is what selling from the heart looks like in a kitchen.
Featuring a foreword by Joe Theesfeld, Division President of a leading broadline distributor, a letter from a restaurant owner revealing what buyers actually want from their reps, and field-tested results from sales teams who put these principles to work and watched their cultures - and their numbers - transform.
Whether you sell produce, proteins, dairy, dry goods, frozen, or specialty items, this book will change how you show up at every kitchen door. Your buyers do not need another price sheet. They need a partner they can trust. This book shows you how to become one.
In this business, I need someone I can count on more than I need someone I like. - A buyer, quoted in the book
The wholesale food industry needs you. Not the scripted, price-quoting version. The real you.
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