At a conference call, James Quincey the President and CEO of the well-known food and beverage industry company, Coca Cola heaved a heavy sigh. After that, he announced that the second quarter was one of the toughest moments for Coca Cola due to the pandemic as reported by fooddive.com.
Coca Cola experienced a 28% drop in sales. Whereas the moment in spring and early summer is always the best moment for Coca Cola to gain profits.
Not only Coca Cola, a number of food and beverage industry companies also experienced a decline in income due to the pandemic. Changes in consumption patterns are one of the causes that encourage consumers to be more careful in buying goods.
Inevitably, this has a big impact on many parties in the food and beverage industry supply chain process, including suppliers. F&B suppliers are also experiencing difficulties because many companies ask for delays in payments. What is the right way to solve it?
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Delaying payment to keep the company cash running
Changes in consumer patterns have also made a number of food and beverage industry companies make big decisions. One of them, is to delay payments to suppliers. The reason is that the company’s funds are maintained & sufficient to keep operations running.
On average, there was an increase in payment dues from 55 days to 58 days in research conducted by Hackett.inc on 1000 companies in America. Research also says that CFOs are more focused on keeping company funds sufficient during the pandemic.
For this reason, the decision to postpone payments was taken as an appropriate step. One of America’s leading food and beverage industry companies, Mondelez experienced the same thing. Reporting from the WSJ, the average payment time to suppliers increased from the initial 122 days to 130 days in the first quarter of 2021.
In Indonesia, F&B suppliers are also experiencing the same thing. They were forced to experience delays in payments by their clients from the company due to the pandemic. On the other hand, they also can do nothing but wait for payment.
As a result, F&B suppliers can find it difficult to run their company’s operations. The lack of funds makes them squeezed and must be smart in using limited funds.
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Solutions that can be done by suppliers
F&B suppliers have done many ways to survive the pandemic. One of them, they choose to delay the supply of goods until paid. This method is also widely used by several vendors, as reported by CNBC.
However, this method is considered inappropriate. Remembering, vendors certainly need payment to keep their business running. Otherwise, they could find problems and crash operations.