WE PRIDE OURSELVES ON HAVING STRONG RELATIONSHIPS

Ceasar Brown, Senior Vice President of Sales and Business Strategies at DFMi, dicusses the specialty sales and marketing company...

DFMi was founded in 1988 and focuses on the travel and transportation industry. While the airlines and most of the industry might consider us a traditional broker, we don’t operate as one.

Supplier partners

DFMi is an extension of the supplier partner. When we represent a brand in front of customers – the airlines – we want them to view us as an extension of the company. DFMi is very selective in who we represent and we don’t carry competing products or brands.

We do all the vetting for the airlines before they get involved making sure that supplier partners can meet demands, whatever the volumes might be. We understand the ownership structure of that supplier partner, their production capabilities and we qualify them from a food safety standpoint.

Take pretzels – we choose just one manufacturer, the one we feel is the most suitable and prepared to partner with the airlines. We choose by flavour, packaging and their overall capabilities.

We aren’t employed by manufacturers but represent them just like a salesperson from their own organisation, so we consider ourselves the sales and marketing arm of our supplier partners.

Airline customers

We pride ourselves on holistically understanding our customers – the airlines – and their culture; not just for a transaction. We understand how they do business, from product selection to putting products onboard and passengers touching them. That’s where we really differ from a broker. Our hope is customers view us as an experienced, knowledgeable team and a great source for special products and programmes.

Today’s challenges

The biggest challenge today is pricing. With inflation and rising costs in raw goods and materials, labour and logistics, we are constantly working towards finding common ground that both our supplier and customer find mutually beneficial.

We want supplier partners to be as successful as possible, which means them being profitable. At the same time, we have a partnership with airline customers that's not transactional. We have personal relationships with the procurement and product selection teams and want to give them a buying programme that helps them save money and be more profitable too.

We pride ourselves on having strong relationships with both our customers and suppliers and we are grateful for the transparent relationships that we have worked so hard to build over our 35 years in the industry. •