The Bare Pantry Food Company
Aussie Bob phones The Bare Pantry Food Company's wholesale customers every week, takes their reorders by voice, text or WhatsApp, and hands each confirmed order to a dashboard where the team packs, checks and dispatches it. Since going live, Bob has taken 578 orders — around 98,000 packs — from 205 shops.
Figures from the live system, August to October 2026
At a Glance
Industry
Food & Beverage / Wholesale distribution
Customers
Around 250 retail shops across Ireland, most reordering every week
Challenge
Taking weekly reorders from hundreds of busy shops, one phone call at a time
Solution
An AI ordering agent on the phone, text and WhatsApp — backed by a telesales dashboard the team controls
Key Results
The Challenge
The Bare Pantry Food Company supplies around 250 shops across Ireland — symbol-group stores, forecourts and independents — and most of them reorder every week. Every one of those reorders needs someone to reach the shop, take the order down product by product, and get it to the warehouse.
Shop buyers are busy. They're on the floor, at the till or out, and a missed call is a missed order. Bare Pantry wanted every shop to be offered a reorder every week — and for every order to arrive clean, confirmed and ready to pack.
How It Works
Bob is an AI ordering agent with a real phone number. He calls, texts and answers like a member of the telesales team — and knows the whole catalogue.
Every telesales shop gets a call in its own weekly slot — a first round on Monday, a second on Wednesday for anyone Bob missed, then a follow-up text. Shops that have just ordered are skipped, and staff can book a call for any time.
Nicknames, half-remembered product names, "same again" — Bob matches each one to the catalogue, checks stock, reads the order back and only places it once the buyer says yes.
The confirmed order lands on the telesales dashboard, where the team packs it and sends it to dispatch. Only then does it go on to the ordering system — exactly as the customer confirmed it.
The Agent
Bob was built for Bare Pantry's catalogue, customers and rules — not bolted on from a template. Every conversation ends the same way: a complete order, read back and confirmed by the buyer.
Shops can take Bob's call, ring him back whenever suits them, or just text an order in. Same Bob, same catalogue and the same rules on every channel.
Buyers rarely use the product name on the invoice. Bob knows the nicknames, copes with misspellings and mishearings, and asks "did you mean…?" when he isn't sure — rather than guessing.
Bob knows what's in stock, what's on hold and each product's minimum order, so he offers an alternative instead of taking an order the warehouse can't fill.
Bare Pantry's reps and office team can phone or text Bob to place an order on a shop's behalf — it goes through the same checks and lands in the same place.
Shops ask Bob for shelf labels or raise a query mid-order. Each one is logged for the team, and labels travel with the shop's next order.
If a call drops halfway through an order, nothing is lost — Bob offers to carry on from the same basket on the next call or text.
An order by text
Hi Bob, 12 paprika almonds and 6 of the 5 nut mix please
Thanks! That's 12 × Paprika Almonds and 6 × 5 Nut Mix. Anything else, or will I place the order?
That's it, go ahead
Done — your order's placed. Thanks, and talk next week!
The Telesales Dashboard
Bob doesn't post orders straight into Bare Pantry's ordering platform or their ERP and accounting system. Every order — whether Bob took it or the team placed it themselves — lands on the telesales dashboard first. The team packs it there and sends it to dispatch, and only then does it go on to the ordering system.
Nothing is sent to the systems that hasn't been sent to the customer. The order the shop agreed to, the order the system holds and the invoice raised from it all match — so there's no editing invoices after the fact, and no discrepancy between what the customer was told and what the system says.
The same dashboard runs the rest of the telesales operation: the calling rounds and their results, stock, customer queries, bulk messages and product recalls, and which shops are on Bob, when they're called and who their rep is.
Reporting
Because orders, invoices and payments all sit in one place, the dashboard also carries the finance and sales reports the business relies on — each one a click away and exported to Excel or PDF.
Every account's outstanding balance by age, in euro and sterling, matched to the accounting system — with a detailed Excel of every open invoice, account by account.
Packs invoiced to every shop, month by month, and the average packs per week by sub-category for a chosen list of shops — built from the invoices themselves and exported to Excel or PDF.
A printable report of everything Bob did over any date range: shops called and reached, texts handled, orders taken and what they were worth.
Live results for every calling round — called, answered, ordered and still to reach — by rep and by week, so the team knows exactly who to follow up.
Revenue, packs and orders from invoiced sales, by shop, product and sub-category, filterable by rep, province and telesales shops.
Results & Impact
Bob went live for Bare Pantry's full telesales list on 31 August 2026, after a pilot that began in August. Telesales shops are now offered a reorder every week, and every order arrives at the warehouse confirmed and ready to pack.
Bare Pantry's Northern Ireland shops run on a dashboard of their own — read the Northern Ireland case study.
Related services
If your team spends its week chasing reorders by phone, an ordering agent can take the calls — and hand your team a clean, confirmed order to dispatch.