Buyer's Best Friend (BBF) is a new way to buy and sell wholesale products, starting in food.

For buyers, BBF has the largest catalog that replaces paper brochures, calls to sales reps for information, and offers free online ordering, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. learn more

For sellers, BBF is an inexpensive way to reach thousands of buyers nationwide, including many famous hotels and groceries that are otherwise hard to "get into." learn more

For brokers and sales reps, BBF replaces brochures and allows your buyers to answer routine questions and place routine orders, freeing hours of order entry every day and allowing you to spend more time opening new accounts-- and best of all, BBF doesn't charge per-transaction fees, so you keep your entire sales commission. learn more

The BBF team lives by these axioms:

• "It's all about people: respect everyone, focus on the buyer". People buy from people and BBF is designed around reducing the paperwork of sales, so salespeople can focus on the creative arts of cutting deals, solving problems, and pioneering products.


• "Be practical". We take practical approaches to problems, including prioritization. We're not afraid to admit failure and try new approaches. We listen to feedback from all sources.


• "Change is good". We build new things for the world and don't just compete on price; we don't try to stop or slow innovation; we try to help everyone with transitions.


• "Think big". Our ambitions are not regional or limited to one market.


• "Create joy". BBF isn't just a job, we're creating BBF to change the world and delight everyone along the way.

If these ideas resonate with you, and you either like to sell stuff or build stuff (read: software), send us a resume: inquiries+jobs@bbfdirect.com.

BBF started in March, 2010, when Joyce complained to her partner Adam about how time-consuming it was to sell wholesale food, and Adam suggested that he could maybe write some software to help her-- he'd spent 5 years at Google and 20 in the software business and was looking for an interesting project. 30 days later, Joyce was taking all her orders using this software, which she affectionately called "Buyer's Best Friend" to reflect her dream that her customers might someday place their own reorders.

In June that year, Adam and Joyce took their annual trip to the Fancy Food Show in New York and showed off BBF for the first time, and 100 manufacturers signed up in 3 days, trade press asked to interview them, and brokers and buyers said that they'd never seen anything like this before. They went back to California, incorporated a company, filed a patent on the technology and got to work turning this prototype into a product, which went into 'private beta' in July.

By September that year, buyers were placing orders on their own and other brokers were using the system. By November, over 10% of Joyce's orders were being placed self-serve and many of the others she was placing in the stores, on her iPad. Meanwhile, hundreds of producers were selling thousands of products on BBF and through other brokers, hundreds of stores were getting product through BBF, including Bi-Rite (SF), Zabar's (NY), Zingerman's (Ann Arbor), Mollie Stone's Markets (Northern California), Star Provisions (Atlanta), and Joie de Vivre Hotels & Restaurants.

As you can see, the story is still being written, and if you buy or sell wholesale products, Adam and Joyce would love you to join our community.

Joyce Guan, Founder and VP Sales. Joyce is the visionary behind Buyer's Best Friend. Previously, she ran sales for Charles Chocolates, where she learned about private label and co-branding, shelf life and shipping cost, distribution and channel conflict, lead generation, managing sales staff and more. Previously, she held a range of positions including SF Asian American Film Festival (marketing), the bakery box (founder), Ionami (sales), VerticalNet Solutions (Product Manager). She holds a B.A. from UC Berkeley.

Adam Sah, Founder and CEO. Adam is CEO and technical founder of Buyer's Best Friend, his 7th startup over 20 years, including Foodzie.com, Google (he invented Google Gadgets), SenSage (log data management for large companies), iPIX (virtual real estate tours-- IPO'99), Cohera (federated databases-- acquired by Oracle), Inktomi (#1 search engine before Google- HotBot- IPO'98); Ovid (medical research databases- IPO'94). Adam received a Master's Degree in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and BS in Computer Science from the SUNY Stony Brook. He has 10 issued patents in databases and internet infrastructure.

John Mills, Director of Engineering. John is the Director of Engineering and founding engineer. Buyer's Best Friend is his third startup. Previously he worked at Transpond (acquired by WebTrends), where he created a B2B platform for publishing widgets on phones and on the web. Previously, he focused on "big data" problems scaling the Semantic Web for consumers at Radar Networks, later acquired by Evri. Before this, John worked at CNET where he optimized their online marketing using a variety of techniques, including API mashups and search engine optimization. John has a BS Computer Information Systems from Champlain College.

Rob Konigsberg, advisor and investor. Robert is an advisor to BBF and also their first investor. He's been a software engineer and manager for 20 years, most recently working for six years at Google on a variety of projects spanning ads, infrastructure and developer tools. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Binghamton University.

Tired of 100s of calls and visits from reps? Want a one-stop shop?

For Buyers, BBF simplifies buying:

		• Minutes to shop among 109,596 of products from 1,701 of companies, including both mainstream and artisan brands. BBF is one of the fastest and easiest sites on the web, built by former software designers from Google (everything) and CNET (electronics), working closely with brokers and buyers. BBF is the fastest way to do category reviews, stock a new store, assemble gift baskets, follow trends, and more.
		• the richest information anywhere, no more cryptic shorthands or spelling mistakes like you see in distributor databases, because BBF works with manufacturers to get the details right, from photos to shelf life and more.
		• order samples and open new accounts fast. Establish relationships with manufacturers, without the usual phonecalls, emails and faxes-- with BBF, your reputation carries from one account to the other. In most cases, you can order from a new manufacturer in seconds.
		• one-click reorders. BBF remembers what you ordered and makes it one-click to reorder either the exact same thing, or add and remove items, change quantities, etc.

Large company buyers: if you're jealous of BBF's ordering system, ask your IT department to contact us: we can quickly onboard your manufacturers and distributors' lines, and integrate BBF with your existing systems. Our engineers have 30 years experience with enterprise integrations at the world's largest and most demanding companies.

To learn more and start shopping, sign up for a free account.

Struggling to reach marquee buyers? Are small buyers "hardly worth" the time they take?

• Reach marquee buyers. Because of the size and quality of our catalog, BBF is regularly invited to meet with buyers large and small. BBF marquee accounts include major hotel chains, corporate customers, independent and chain groceries, airlines and more.

• Automate smaller buyers. Every seller has small accounts that order $1000 or less per year-- and it's expensive and annoying to keep calling and emailing them for their tiny orders. Instead, send them to your BBF page, and because BBF is so easy to use, they'll be successful and themselves happy to get fewer phonecalls. For buyers, BBF is a single login to remember, a single system to use, and their BBF reputation carries from one manufacturer to another, making it easy to order new brands.

• Keep control, while publishing to Google and the web. BBF is careful with your Confidential information-- only qualified buyers (by referral, or by background check) are allowed into the system, and we blank-out Confidential fields when publishing to Google.

The first step is to join the hundreds of companies listing on BBF-- sign up here for free. For a limited time, BBF will even do the digitizing work for you!

Looking for brokers or distributors? BBF can help. Email Joyce Guan at
producer-support@bbfdirect.com

Feeling overwhelmed? Buried in paper? Spending evenings entering orders?

For reps, BBF isn't software, it's a new way of life-- buyers start coming to you, small buyers order for themselves, and orders are entered immediately, eliminating double-entry. This frees you to spend more time opening new accounts and working with large and strategic accounts.

Brokers: BBF was designed for brokers with multiple lines-- we onboard your manufacturers and build you a broker website for free (including a fully featured catalog and ordering capability), which is linked into BBF's broker directory. Finally, you can fully cross-sell and upsell all of your product lines, instead of having your accounts just order the same old product lines. Brokers who join BBF experience rapid ROI, since thousands of buyers use BBF, and the ease of use encourages regular ordering through the system.

To learn more about BBF for reps and brokers, schedule a demo with our founder, Joyce Guan, who designed BBF from her experience as a broker.