Founded in 1952 as a family-owned, single-store meat market in Boston, Massachusetts, Roche Bros. has grown over the past 70 years into a thriving regional grocer with 20 locations across the Greater Boston area. Still led by brothers Rick and Ed Roche, the company’s enduring success can be attributed to its commitment to providing their customers with exceptional service, premium products, and a wide range of offerings.
Roche Bros. has long been a champion of local food, carrying hundreds of products crafted by artisans throughout Massachusetts and New England. From fresh, locally baked bread delivered daily to regionally made mayonnaise, the supermarket believes in the importance of offering its customers high-quality, locally sourced products.
As Roche Bros. grew, so did the complexity of managing a robust local program across 20 stores. Unlike dealing with a broadline distributor, each Roche Bros. store had to individually contact local producers, submit orders, and coordinate deliveries. Meanwhile, the Roche Bros. finance team handled the labor-intensive task of entering each invoice and issuing payments to each supplier. The manual effort involved in managing hundreds of weekly invoices is significant, not to mention error prone.
With a continually expanding selection of local products, the one thing that became clear was the need for a streamlined process to manage the ordering, scheduling, invoicing and payments from more than two dozen suppliers and more than 400 local products. In 2020, Roche selected Local Line as their all-in-one local food procurement platform, allowing them to simplify their farm-to-fork supply chain.
Across all 20 locations, the Local Line platform has significantly improved operational efficiency when it comes to dealing with local suppliers. Stores are able to place multiple orders in one interface, saving hours of manual work each week. For example, when conducting a company-wide category reset, stores can pre-order products and assign delivery destinations for each location. Once deliveries are made, receivers can verify and mark the orders as received directly through Local Line.
Local Line allows Roche Bros. to customize the platform for each store location, striking the right balance between product consistency and store-level control. Category managers can view each supplier’s catalog and approve which products will be available for each store. Store-level buyers only see the suppliers and products that have been authorized for their locations, preventing any possible errors in product selection.
Instant access to each order status and history has further streamlined Roche Bros.'s operations. Category managers now have complete visibility into the products being ordered at each store and when they are being delivered, which reduces the need for back-and-forth communication between store staff and management. The Local Line platform’s data dashboard also provides management with insights into local spending, product performance, and store-level metrics, enabling them to make more informed decisions on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.
For category managers, finding new local suppliers and products is a time consuming task that, in many cases, feels like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. Local Line’s built-in search feature helps identify high quality new brands, allowing stores to filter results by location to focus on producers that meet Roche Bros.’s definition of “local.” This feature has made it easier to discover high-quality, locally produced items to add to their shelves.
Thanks to the efficiency gained through Local Line, Roche Bros. has been able to significantly increase its selection of local products and introduce new items to its customers. Jason Corriveau, Roche Bros. Director of Grocery, explains, “Local Line bypasses traditional distribution channels and allows us to get products directly from local suppliers to each of our locations. Local Line gave us access to local products that we didn’t previously have the ability to buy.”
By adopting Local Line, Roche Bros. has been able to stay true to their commitment to support local suppliers in all their stores while improving efficiency and saving time.
