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Letter From the President 2026


A Letter from the President, 2026

2026

A Letter from the President

Dear Community, Partners, Clients, and Team,

This year, more than any I can remember, has asked a lot of you.

Many of you have navigated shifting margins, policy changes, and tariffs that don’t just change prices—they change plans. You’ve managed projects that paused and restarted, fought for freight quotes that actually stick, and still found ways to take care of your teams. Some of you have merged to stay competitive. Some have closed locations that once felt permanent. Others are rebuilding, rethinking, or starting fresh.

Whether you’re a dealer, a vendor, a manufacturer rep, or a supplier, you’ve carried responsibilities that most people never see—but we do. If you’ve spent this year holding the line, making hard calls, and still showing up for your customers and teams, I see you.

I also want to acknowledge something personal: I haven’t been as front-and-center in our marketing as I should have been. My instinct has always been to dive into the work—into your workflows, your product data challenges, your quoting puzzles—not into the spotlight. But part of leading is being visible, especially when times are uncertain. So I want you to hear this clearly from me: I care deeply about you, your teams, and the future of this industry. Beedash exists to help you run stronger, more resilient businesses in hard years, not just easy ones.

What “Grow Together” really means right now

For us, Grow Together isn’t a campaign—it’s how we work. It means we listen first, build with you instead of at you, and judge success by one simple test: does this make your day easier and your business stronger?

This year, that meant getting as close as we could to your real world: sitting in on inside sales calls, watching service teams quote repairs, walking through project bids, and tracing how program and franchise orders actually move through your systems. We paid attention to the spots that always slow you down—where data gets re-typed, where prices drift from reality, where freight is guessed, and where systems dead-end.

Out of that, a few priorities became non-negotiable:

PIM as the quiet backbone. One trusted place for product data so changes happen once and show up everywhere.

Quoting as a hub, not a file. Quotestack keeps quotes tied to real products, pricing, and freight from first draft through order.

One truth, many ways to sell. Whatever channels you use—websites, programs, portals—they all draw from the same product truth.

Underneath all of this is the quiet work you don’t see on a website banner: normalizing vendor data, aligning configurations, mapping parts and accessories, improving freight context, and using AI only where it clearly helps—reducing busywork, improving accuracy, or surfacing patterns you’d never have time to find manually. If it just adds noise or confusion, we don’t use it.

Why the day-to-day details matter now

When costs and conditions keep shifting, the real difference between struggling and staying steady isn’t a big strategy deck—it’s the small, daily things: how close your quotes are to the final invoice and how many times the same information gets re-typed into different systems. In a lot of quoting tools you build a quote, download it, then re-enter every line into your own software or ERP. Every extra step is a chance for a missed item, a wrong decimal, or margin that quietly disappears—leaks most businesses can’t afford.

This is the layer we care about—the plumbing of your day-to-day operations, not just the presentation on top.

For many of you, “innovation” isn’t exciting; it’s exhausting. At the end of the day, it comes down to two things:

Time. Re-keying quotes and chasing updates burns hours you should be spending selling and serving customers.

Trust. When quotes don’t match invoices or timelines slip, it quietly erodes confidence in your process.

Our goal is to give you back hours and help protect the trust you’ve built over years and generations. And I want to be clear: that doesn’t mean we’re perfect.

Product data, pricing, and programs are changing faster than any one company can keep perfectly in sync. We work hard to stay current, but we also rely on our manufacturers and on you—our dealers, reps, vendors, and suppliers—to flag what you’re seeing on the ground. When you call or email with an issue, we don’t see it as a nuisance; we see it as partnership. We act as your back office, move quickly to correct the source, and push the fix through so nobody has to clean it up twice.

That’s the kind of relationship we’re committed to: not pretending everything is flawless, but standing next to you in the mess and doing the work to make it better, faster, and more reliable over time.

An invitation (and a promise)

We’re rolling out the next phase of our quoting tool and expanding integrations across websites, program catalogs, reorder portals, and accounting/ERP. We’re also forming a Dealer & Manufacturer Focus Group to shape what comes next—pricing controls, freight intelligence, approval workflows, and reporting that ties all channels together without spreadsheets.

If you want in—whether you’re ready to replace your quoting tool or just want a seat at the table—we’d be honored to have you. You’ll get early access, direct input into the roadmap, and hands-on help from our team. More importantly, you’ll help us build a system that works the way you work.

And here’s the promise: we will continue to show up, listen hard, build with care, and speak plainly. We’ll prioritize fewer clicks and clearer outcomes over flashy features. We will not chase technology for its own sake. We’ll use it to protect time, margin, and trust.

If you don’t know me yet

If we haven’t met, here’s why this work is so personal to me.

I started as a business consultant in 1997, stepping into companies that were doing many things right—but were limited by disconnected workflows, siloed teams, and tools that didn’t talk. Back then, we stretched QuickBooks, spreadsheets, Timberline, and other accounting systems as far as they would go. When nothing existed, I built small “bridge” tools to connect departments so:

Finance could see operations.

Sales could see inventory and costs.

Leadership could see real performance and value across the team.

Efficiency was never just about numbers. It was about dignity for the people doing the work and clarity for the people making decisions.

In 2013, I founded Beedash after a buying group in our industry brought me a puzzle: how do you normalize wildly different product data from hundreds of vendors so dealers can actually use it—to sell, to market, and to quote—without drowning in manual work? That challenge became our mission.

More than a decade later, product data is still at the heart of what we do—but now it powers websites, PIM, program catalogs, reorder portals, quoting for projects, and integrations into the systems you already rely on. Over the last two years, we’ve invested heavily in AI and data science to deal with the realities of configurations, parts, and accessories at scale.

We’re still a small, driven team—people you may know by first name: Austin, Nic, Angie, Andrea, Tim, and many others. We celebrate your wins. We worry with you when things get hard. We remember when someone is in the hospital or when a new baby arrives. We feel lucky to serve an industry full of family businesses and long-standing relationships.

Looking ahead

The economy will keep shifting. Politics will keep shifting. Tariffs may rise and fall. Business may never be as simple as we’d like it to be.

Through all of that, our job remains the same: to empower growth through technology in Foodservice Equipment & Supply by removing friction, aligning data, and making your best processes the easiest ones to follow.

If you’re ready—or even just curious—about what a different future for quoting, product data, and connected channels could look like in your world, I’d love to talk. Show us where your process drags. Tell us what you’re afraid to lose. Let us share what we’re building. And if now isn’t your moment, we’ll still listen—and we’ll keep building toward the day it is.

Thank you for trusting us, challenging us, and walking this road with us. We’re here. We’re listening. And we’re in this with you.

With heartfelt appreciation,

Kari Whittemore

Founder & President, Beedash

If you’d like to join the Dealer & Manufacturer Focus Group or see a working session on Quotestack and connected catalogs, contact us through the website. We’ll follow up personally and schedule time with you and your team.

Pro Kitchen

Hospitality Supply

Lawler Fixture

Cary Restaurant Equipment

Bentonville Restaurant Supply