sales

Density over Doors: Why Focus on One Region First

When food brands begin selling into retail, expansion often feels like the natural measure of progress. More stores appear to signal more demand. More regions suggest momentum. Yet retail does not reward breadth in the way many founders expect.

To understand why, it helps to look more closely at how retailers and distributors are organized and how brand performance is evaluated within that structure.

How Retail Is Organized

There are different ways to classify retailers. The simplest for emerging food brands is understanding it through: region and channel.

Region

A region is a defined geographic area. While boundaries differ slightly by retailer and distributor, natural and specialty retail in the U.S. is generally divided into 8 to 10 regions. Each region is serviced by specific distributors and their warehouses (also known as distribution centers or DC).

For those building in the DC-area, the region is the Mid-Atlantic. Other common ones includes: Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, etc.

Channel

A channel refers to the type of store. There are a number of channels, for now, we're focusing on four: independent (generally less than 10 locations), specialty, conventional grocery, and mass. Each Channel has its own set of priorities, shoppers, and distributors that they work with.

Retailers purchase product through distributors that service both their region and channel. Those distributors manage inventory through distribution centers, or DCs, which act as the operational hub for ordering, storage, and delivery.

Similarly, distributors are also organized by which channels and regions they service.

How Distribution Centers Shape Performance

Distributors do not operate as a single national system. Instead, they are organized into warehouses, referred to as distribution centers (or DCs). Each distribution center functions as its own unit.

A retailer in the Mid-Atlantic ordering through UNFI (a national distributor), for example, can only purchase products stocked in the Mid-Atlantic distribution center. Sales in other regions do not affect what is available to that buyer.

For this reason, distributors assess brand performance at the distribution-center level. What matters is how much product moves through a specific DC, not how many stores a brand has across the country.

This has practical consequences.

If product is spread thinly across multiple regions, each distribution center sees only a small amount of movement. If product is concentrated within one region, that same volume appears much stronger within a single warehouse.

Density in Practice

Given all of that, when you are starting, think about density over doors. This means saturating one region and one channel before moving on to the next one.

Consider two ways a brand might reach 50 retail accounts.

In one case, all 50 stores are located within the same region and serviced by a single distribution center. In another, the brand has 10 stores in each of five regions, spread across five different distribution centers.

From the distributor’s perspective, these scenarios look very different. The first creates concentrated movement in one warehouse. They see your product having strong sell-through. The second creates what to appears to be as minimal movement even if the total number of doors (or stores) is the same.

What Density Changes Operationally

Distribution is only one side of the equation. Density also affects cost, execution, and being customer familiarity in a given region.

When stores are concentrated:

Orders tend to be larger and more predictable
Fulfillment costs per unit are lower
Inventory turns are easier to manage
Sales and support efforts are localized
Customers get used to seeing your product everywhere

When stores are dispersed:

Orders are smaller and less frequent
Shipping and handling costs rise
Time spent maintaining accounts increases
Learning slows because signals are diluted

These differences show up in cash flow, operational complexity, and perceived market fit of your product.

This is why the question of where early sales happen matters as much as how many there are. Retail and distribution systems are built to evaluate performance locally, through specific warehouses serving specific geographies. A product that moves steadily through one distribution center tells a clearer story than one that moves sporadically across several.