34 Hospitality Companies From Cold Outreach (Hilton, Hyatt, Four Seasons)

The gourmet food brand

A gourmet food brand came to us with a premium product, a good DTC presence, but a retail channel limited to a few distributor relationships and whatever came in organically.

Sound familiar? That’s most premium food brands. Great product, loyal DTC customers, and a wholesale channel that’s basically waiting for the phone to ring.

We built a campaign targeting restaurants, hotels, arenas, convention centers, and hospitality groups. Over the course of the engagement, we contacted over 40,000 of these accounts.

The result

The result was striking.

This one brand generated qualified retailer intros with 34 different notable hospitality companies. That includes Hilton, Hyatt, Four Seasons, Marriott, Nobu, Pebble Beach Resorts, Mission BBQ, Daniel Boulud, Perdue Farms, Flying Food Group, Gordon Food Service, and about 23 others.

Buyers at those companies replied to cold outreach about this brand’s product and asked to learn more. Four of those companies do over $1 billion a year in revenue. Ten do over $100 million.

Why this matters

This didn’t happen because the brand was special. It happened because someone built a system to get their product in front of the right buyers with the right message.

The product was already good. It just needed distribution.

That’s the whole story. Good products fail every day because nobody knows they exist. The buyer at Hilton doesn’t have time to discover your gourmet food brand on Instagram. The category manager at Hyatt isn’t browsing DTC sites looking for new F&B options. They’re busy running hospitality empires.

If you want them to know about your product, you have to tell them. In a way that respects their time. With a message that makes sense for their operation. And you have to do it at scale, because the first 39,000 emails might not reach the right person at Hilton. The 40,001st might.

The names that change how you think

I list those names for a reason. Most brands read “hospitality outreach” and picture diners and coffee shops. That’s part of it. But it’s also Hilton and Four Seasons and Marriott.

These are not accounts you stumble into. These are accounts that require a real system to reach, because their buyers are shielded by layers of gatekeeping. Cold email, done well, gets through those layers. Not because cold email is clever. Because cold email, done well, is relevant and specific and lands in front of the actual decision-maker instead of dying at the info@ address.

If your product is good and you’re wondering whether the right retailers would respond, the answer is yes. They just need to hear from you.

What this looks like for your category

The hospitality case study is dramatic because the names are dramatic. But the same dynamic plays out in every category we touch.

In pet, it’s groomers and independent pet stores and natural grocers. In food, it’s specialty retailers and gift shops and grocery accounts. In beauty, it’s boutiques and salons and specialty beauty retailers. In leather goods, it’s Scheels, a $1.7 billion retailer.

The category changes. The system doesn’t. Find the right retailers, build the right message, reach them at scale, qualify the replies. Good products get picked up because the system puts them in front of buyers who didn’t know they existed.

The question for you

If your product is good, the buyers you want to reach would carry it. That’s not the question. They would.

The question is whether you have a system to get in front of them, or whether you’re hoping they find you on their own.

Hilton didn’t find the gourmet food brand. The gourmet food brand found Hilton. With a system. With 40,000 emails. With the right targeting and the right message.

Your version of Hilton is out there. Probably several of them. The question is whether you’re going to build the system to reach them.

---

Want to see what kind of accounts you could reach? Let’s talk.