Beginning June 1, 2021 – All independent restaurants will have a 5:00 PM cut off time
Beginning May 17, 2021 – All corporate restaurants will have a 4:00 PM cut off time
Customers in Chattanooga, Knoxville, Tri-Cities, Sevierville, Pigeon Forge, Gatlinburg, North Georgia, Alabama, and North Carolina will continue to have an 11:00 PM order cut off time for produce only.
Important Announcement Regarding Cut Off Times
Creation Gardens has always found creative ways to bring cost neutral services that are beyond the capabilities of our competitors. We pride ourselves in providing you services like: Daily delivery, no minimums, broken cases, 24/7 customer service, and paying special attention to having the highest quality products available on the seven most challenging product lines.
We know you are painfully aware that labor shortages are plaguing the entire restaurant industry including the food supply chain. We are receiving product shipments late due to national driver shortages; we are getting our order quantities cut from nearly all under-staffed producers.
To get through this emergency, our top managers have assessed this worsening crisis and debated dozens of ideas on how we continue to be a great partner to you during this crisis. This current scramble to collect shorts from late arriving suppliers and reduced quantities is absolutely gumming up our entire order building processes. As more of the country opens, this problem is going to get worse – we cannot allow it to reach a breaking point that causes us to fail you like we are seeing with so many other distributors.
We have concluded that the only way to adequately serve you is by setting a 5:00pm cut-off time for next day orders. This will allow us to assess the nightly orders in total so that we have time to smartly allocate scarce product, make the right substitutions, and to get our trucks out on time. The problems are escalating every day and within the next four weeks half the country is opening from zero to one hundred percent capacity! Please let that sink in. How can we not expect that this will put an additional strain on the food supply chain? We are getting out front of this problem and feel we would be derelict in our duties if we did not plan a solution with you.
Starting Monday May 17th for Tuesday the 18th delivery we are going to ask all of you to VOLUNTARILY place your orders by 5pm local time. We will have adjusted our staff to accommodate order entry and offer increased customer service in the afternoons. Additionally, our IT team has programmed solutions on how we can automatically communicate to you via text those items that have been affected. There will be time to adjust if you respond immediately. We both will need this time to practice and improve on these processes before the nation opens and supply becomes even more challenging. During this time, we will continue to allow orders up until your current cut off times, but orders received after 5:00pm will not be included in the allocation process for scarce products. On Tuesday June 1 for deliveries on Wednesday June 2, we will be firm on the 5pm cut off.
Customers in Chattanooga, Knoxville, Tri-Cities, Sevierville, Pigeon Forge, Gatlinburg, North Georgia, Alabama, and North Carolina will continue to have an 11:00 PM order cut off time for produce.
We thank you for your understanding and continued partnership. Our goal is to always provide you with the best recipe for success we know – for without you, we have nothing!
Respectfully,
The What Chefs Want team
