What a CPG Broker Actually Does (Besides Take a Cut)

Every founder I meet has a cousin who "knows a guy" at a grocery chain. That guy can get you a meeting. What he can't get you is a reorder, a working trade budget, or a category manager who remembers your name in March after your product launched in January and nobody restocked it. That's the part nobody's cousin mentions.

A CPG broker isn't a rolodex with a pulse. The job is translation. Retailers speak in POS data, ACV, and category reviews scheduled eighteen months out. Founders speak in "my product is delicious and my mom loves it." Somebody has to sit in the middle and turn passion into a sell sheet a buyer will actually open, and turn a buyer's vague feedback ("velocity's soft") into a plan that fixes the actual problem, whether that's price, placement, or the fact that your case pack makes their receiver want to quit.

The good ones also carry the boring stuff you never budgeted for: deduction management, chargebacks, distributor onboarding paperwork that reads like it was written to be abandoned halfway through. I've watched founders lose more margin to a mishandled deduction than to a bad promotion. Nobody posts about that on LinkedIn.

Here's what a broker is not: a guarantee. Anyone promising shelf space on a first call is selling you a feeling, not a plan. What you should expect instead is someone who tells you when you're not ready for Kroger yet, who pushes distributor conversations (KeHE, UNFI, AFS, wherever your category actually lives) before you've burned cash on a launch nobody stocked to reorder, and who treats your trade spend like it's their own money, because eventually it functions that way.

If you're an emerging brand trying to figure out whether you need a broker or just need to get your operations in order first, that's a fair question and the honest answer is usually both, just not at the same time. A good broker will tell you which one comes first.