A salesperson is standing in a restaurant kitchen, or perhaps in the fluorescent calm of a distributor conference room, when someone asks the question that matters. Does this product come in the right pack size? Who carries it nearby? What is the preparation method? The rep knows the answer exists. It is in a binder, an inbox, a shared drive or another person's head. But it is not here. So out comes the sentence that SCHIED has organized an entire product family against: “I'll get back to you.”
This is a wonderfully modest enemy. It has none of advertising's usual villains - no collapsing brand, no hostile takeover, no celebrity apology. It is simply a delay. Yet in foodservice, where a manufacturer sells through brokers and distributors before an operator ever plates the product, a delay can end the useful part of a conversation. The question is alive now. The answer arrives Thursday.
SCHIED is a small, privately held agency in Westlake Village, California. Its legal name is Schiedermayer & Associates, Inc.; its shorter name is pronounced “sheed.” Founder Stephen Louis Schiedermayer remains its chief executive in current California registry data. Founded in 1997 and incorporated the following year, it works across foodservice, retail, consumer and industrial channels, with particular experience in seafood and produce. The familiar agency menu is all there: strategy, positioning, branding, web design, social, advertising, public relations, sales materials and project management. The interesting part is what grew beside it.
“Eliminate the dreaded ‘I'll get back to you’ response to a customer's question.”
The binder was not broken. It was aging.
Old systems rarely announce their failure. A printed product guide becomes wrong one SKU at a time. A distributor changes. A case size is corrected. A photo is replaced. Marketing gathers the edits, sends them to a creative team, waits for proofs, circulates revisions, gets a print estimate, waits again, ships copies to fulfillment and finally alerts sales. SCHIED's own comparison puts that sequence at four to eight weeks.
The first thing to fail, then, is not design but freshness. The prettier the obsolete page, the more confidently it can mislead. SCHIED's Retrievers Suite recasts the brochure as a database with a front end. Its Digital Product Guide can filter by product, distributor, brand, group purchasing organization or a client's own categories. Its Distributor Look-Up asks for a postal code and preferred distributor, then shows what is locally stocked in the United States or Canada. Its chatbot is designed to retrieve training, preparation, terminology and product information by text or voice.
A campaign shop discovers a product
The shift makes sense when you look backward. SCHIED's public record includes years of work around Alaska seafood. A 2011 Bristol Bay project report describes a marketing plan, trade and foodservice public relations, work related to BristolBaySockeye.org, and video editing and production. The project carried a $70,000 budget; the report listed $37,500 actually spent at that point. That figure is useful precisely because current Retrievers pricing is not public. It tells us what one historical, multi-part public engagement cost - not what a guide, locator or chatbot costs today.
The Alaska work also shows what the agency had to learn: a grocery seafood buyer is not a home cook, and neither is a chef or distributor rep. The 2012 AlaskaSeafood.org campaign, credited to Schiedermayer & Associates and Joe Shoemaker, won the Web Marketing Association's Best Advertising Integrated Ad Campaign award. Its stated audience was grocery seafood buyers and merchandisers; its job was to make the Alaska brand persuasive enough that they would stock, display and promote it.
By fiscal 2014, an Alaska Seafood consumer PR report presented by Schiedermayer Alaska recorded $11.27 million in measured media value and 868.1 million in audience exposure. Those are campaign reporting measures, not revenue and not proof that every exposed person bought fish. But they do reveal a firm accustomed to following information across channels - from a sustainability message, to a journalist, to a retailer, to the person choosing dinner.
The customer is a chain of customers
Most consumer marketers can picture the buyer. Foodservice makes the picture crowded. SCHIED sells to manufacturers and industry groups, but its tools may be used by internal sales teams, outside brokers, distributors and operators. Each sees a different slice of the truth. A public-facing locator should reveal where to buy; a password-protected sales guide may include more sensitive product or distribution information. SCHIED recommends logins and deactivation when access must leave with departing staff.
One product, three different questions
What is true?
How do I sell it?
Where do I get it?
Reser's Foodservice offers a current glimpse of this model outside the demo. Its ResersConnect+ Android app is restricted to new and existing sales and broker team members. It provides product and initiative updates, a Digital Product Guide, sales training and sales materials. The listing names a SCHIED employee as developer contact. In May 2026, the app added a Sales Materials tile and updated its point-of-sale ordering link. This is not a splashy consumer launch. It is maintenance of the plumbing.
The price of specificity
SCHIED competes with specialist food agencies such as IN Food, CSSI, Revelry and Omne, with general agencies, and with a client's own marketing department. For the digital work, the alternative may be a product-information platform, a sales-enablement system or the spreadsheet that everyone promises to clean up. SCHIED's difference is the combination: food-channel knowledge, creative services and custom software-shaped tools under one roof.
That combination has a price beyond the invoice: the client must supply orderly, current information. SCHIED says a Digital Product Guide with 50 or fewer SKUs averages five to six weeks to deliver; 150 or fewer takes 13 to 14 weeks. The distributor locator runs faster - two to three weeks under 50 SKUs and six to seven under 150. Larger catalogs require a custom quote. So the five-minute update should not be confused with a five-minute implementation.
This approach is least convincing when the catalog is tiny, changes are rare, distribution is simple or nobody owns the underlying data. A searchable interface cannot repair contradictory specifications. Custom software may also be excessive when an off-the-shelf catalog already fits. And a tool made for a sales force only earns its keep if the sales force opens it. Adoption, permissions and upkeep are not accessories; they are the work.
The agency's public materials say its focus on efficient digital solutions dates to 2014. That sounds less like a sudden conversion than a gradual change of mind: after enough campaigns, the recurring problem was not always the message. Sometimes the message was marooned in the wrong format. A full-service agency can make a product look desirable. A useful system can tell the rep whether the distributor down the road has it. SCHIED decided to do both.