How Many SKUs Should a Boba Distributor Carry?

Every distributor's catalog grows the same way. A good account asks for lychee jelly, so you bring in lychee jelly. A rep offers a deal on a new syrup line, so you take twelve flavors. Three years later you're carrying 400 SKUs, forty of them haven't sold since last summer, and a meaningful slice of your cash is sitting on the top rack going stale. Nobody decided to build a bloated catalog. It accumulated — and it's quietly taxing everything you do.

What a dead SKU actually costs

The invoice price is the smallest part. A case that doesn't move still ties up the cash you paid for it, occupies rack space that turnover products need, gets counted at every inventory, gets moved every time you reorganize, and — for anything with a date on it — marches steadily toward the dumpster. Stack that across forty slow SKUs and you're funding a museum: thousands of dollars in cash you can't spend, in a business where buying opportunities (container deals, seasonal pricing, a new account's opening order) always come to whoever has cash ready.

There's a subtler cost too: choice paralysis at the point of sale. A 400-item catalog makes your real catalog — the 80 items that matter — harder to find, harder to pitch, and harder for a new account to order from.

The shape of a healthy catalog

Across food distribution generally, something close to a power law holds: roughly 20% of SKUs produce 80% of revenue. Boba supply is even steeper — pearls, the top syrups, powders, cups, lids, straws, and sealing film carry almost everything. A practical way to see your own shape is to sort last quarter's sales by SKU and draw two lines:

How to cut without losing the account

The fear that keeps zombie SKUs alive is always the same: "But that's the item so-and-so orders." Two honest answers. First, check the data — half the time, that account stopped ordering it months ago and the memory outlived the sales. Second, for the items one good account genuinely does buy, you don't need to drop the item; you need to drop the inventory. Move it to special-order: "I'll have it on next week's truck with your regular order." Most shops accept that instantly for a niche item — they run their own menu the same way.

Adding new SKUs like an adult

The discipline that keeps a catalog healthy isn't the annual purge — it's the entry rule. Before a new item earns a slot, make it answer three questions: Who asked? (Two named accounts beats a rep's enthusiasm.) What does it replace? (Shelf space is finite; one in, one out keeps the total honest.) What's the exit? (If it doesn't hit a defined volume in 90 days, it goes to special-order — decided now, while nobody's attached to it.) A distributor who holds that line can say yes to new products faster, because every yes is reversible.

The quarterly ritual

Put one hour on the calendar every quarter: sales by SKU, sorted ascending. Everything with zero movement in 90 days gets a decision — cut, special-order, or one deliberate promotion to move the remaining stock. That single ritual, kept for a year, typically frees up four figures in cash, a wall of rack space, and a catalog a new customer can actually read.

Written by the team at BobaSync — the platform boba shops use to order from their suppliers, with a live catalog that makes the real assortment obvious.