How HB Specialty Foods built a $15M pipeline with America's biggest food companies in 5 months

HB Specialty Foods needed more than $30 million in new business each year. Its sales team was built to take care of the customers it already had.

HB Specialty Foods is a family-run manufacturer of liquid food ingredients generating between $120 million and $150 million a year. Its three-year plan called for roughly doubling the business, and existing customers could not provide that growth on their own.

Chief Sales Officer Bill Day came from a much larger company to build a dedicated sales function at HB. The challenge was that his sellers had effectively become account managers. They were good at taking care of current customers, but they were not consistently creating new opportunities.

A typical seller was working five or six new opportunities in a month, and most of them were small.

The long sales cycle made that gap even more significant. Ingredient deals require formulation work, samples, pricing, and regulatory documentation before anyone signs. One $6 million deal HB closed shortly before working with Uptown had taken more than a year.

"You can't double the size of the business without bringing on new business, right? That's just unrealistic. We're not going to get that much from the current customer base."
-Bill Day, Chief Sales Officer at HB Specialty Foods

Uptown ran LinkedIn outbound from three sales profiles, targeting the research and procurement leaders who choose ingredient suppliers

The strategy came from Bill’s understanding of how HB gets into large accounts.

HB rarely wins by asking a buyer to replace an incumbent supplier immediately. It typically enters as the backup supplier, earns 20 to 30% of the volume, and grows from there.

That model depends on being known before the incumbent falls short. When a buyer needs another option, HB needs to already be familiar and credible.

Uptown targeted research and development directors, product developers, and procurement leaders across food brands and manufacturers. The messaging introduced HB through the backup-supplier opportunity instead of leading with a generic sales pitch.

The outreach ran through three HB sales profiles. Uptown managed the top of the funnel and handed every interested conversation directly to the seller who owned it, allowing HB to book meetings and manage the commercial process internally.

Uptown worked with HB Specialty Foods to:

• Target research, product development and procurement decision makers at food brands and manufacturers, the roles that actually specify a supplier
• Run three sales profiles in parallel, so the outbound covered the team rather than resting on one seller
• Lead with the backup-supplier opening, because that is how HB gets written into an account in the first place
• Manage every response and convert interested buyers into booked meetings with the appropriate seller
• Keep conversations warm through a sales cycle measured in quarters, not weeks

"Our way into a lot of the bigger food manufacturers has been to jump in as their backup supplier. We jump in as that 20 to 30% supplier. And that is something that, if you talk to a procurement person, they're looking for."
- Bill Day, Chief Sales Officer at HB Specialty Foods