Brian Barbara has been in foodservice long enough to remember when a sales call meant dropping off frozen samples and hoping for the best. As the new Chief Revenue Officer at Rockenwagner Bakery — and a veteran of ConAgra, La Brea Bakery, Califia Farms, and stops in between — he’s spent the last decade building something different: sales cultures that lead with data, not instinct. We caught up with Brian at Elevate to talk about why Datassential is the first tool he requests at every new organization, what “consultative selling” actually looks like in practice, and how a bakery uses coffee shop trends to win business.

You’ve brought Datassential into three different organizations over the past seven years. What keeps making it your first call?

It starts with the data itself. In foodservice, you’re constantly swimming in supplier data – and that data is useful, but it has an agenda. What I’ve always needed is something unbiased that I can put in front of a room and have people trust. Datassential does that. It bridges the operator world and the consumer world in a way that most food and beverage data sources don’t even attempt. That combination is rare, and once you’ve built a sales methodology around it, you don’t want to go back to working without it.

Every time I’ve moved to a new organization, the priority has been the same: get Datassential in the building. The way we run marketing calendars, make innovation decisions, structure pricing — all of it gets sharper once your data and team are part of the workflow.

In today’s F&B landscape, showing up with a product and a price sheet no longer cuts it. Sales teams need personalized pitches rooted in real business and industry insight, allowing them to evolve from reps into consultative partners. What does “consultative selling” actually look like in practice?

It means your team walks into an operator conversation prepared to help them grow their business or solve a problem. That’s the framework. Every presentation, every pitch, every sales call should run through that filter.

The hard part is getting there. A lot of salespeople think they’re marketers. They have instincts, they have passion, and they want to tell a story. But instinct without data is just a pitch. When you can go in and say “here’s what’s happening in your local market, here’s where your category is moving, here’s what consumers are actually ordering,” that’s a different conversation entirely.

I tell my team: you can become the expert in the parking lot – just pull up Datassential before you walk in the door.

LA natives might know Rockenwagner best for your retail cafe locations, but I understand that your wholesale bread business is a core part of what you do – supplying restaurants, cafes, and retailers across Southern California and addressing national partnerships through a growing frozen platform. Given that bread is your primary category, can you help us understand why you focus so much on coffee?

Because in addition to the customers we serve at our bakeries, we also serve coffee shops, and if I want to be a real partner to them, I need to understand their business — not just which of our products they’re buying, but what’s happening with cold beverages? What are consumers ordering alongside their pastries? What’s the attachment rate? These are the questions that matter to them, and if I can walk in with answers, I’m not just a vendor anymore.

The menu adoption cycle data is particularly valuable here. It tells us what’s emerging, what’s hitting its peak, what’s starting to fade. That shapes everything, from when we push a new product to when we hold back on an innovation to when we double down on something that’s proven. Even though our primary product is bread, not coffee, coffee shop trends directly affect our roadmap.

Datassential is closely associated with foodservice, but you also have retail responsibilities. Does it hold up across both?

Absolutely, and this is something I think gets underestimated. The tool isn’t just a foodservice tool; it’s a consumer tool. And the consumer is the link between the two channels.

Here’s how I think about it: when I’m selling into retail, I’m talking to a category team. They care about what the consumer wants. Datassential gives me the data to have that conversation credibly — not just “here’s a trend we’re seeing on social media” but “here’s where consumer awareness is, here’s where it’s growing, and here’s what’s happening in foodservice that’s likely to show up in retail within the next 12 to 24 months.” That pipeline from foodservice innovation to the retail shelf is real, and I can use it to get ahead of conversations.

We recently launched at two major U.S. retailers. In those conversations, I’m using Datassential the same way I would in a foodservice pitch – just with a retail audience on the other side of the table.

You mentioned using Datassential to build a new pricing structure for the wholesale business with your finance team. That’s a unique use case. Can you walk us through that?

When I came into Rockenwagner, one of the first things I needed to do was rebuild our price list by category and subcategory, benchmarked against the market. The problem was our existing structure had been in place for 30 years. It reflected how we thought about bread internally, not how the market thinks about it.

Datassential helped me answer the question: how does the industry actually categorize this? What are the subcategories that matter to buyers? If I’m walking into a chain customer or a distributor partner with a price sheet, it needs to speak their language. That’s a language question before it’s a pricing question, and Datassential helped me get it right.

That’s also a broader point about what Datassential actually does. It codifies language. It gives you a shared vocabulary for conversations that would otherwise be full of friction, across your sales team, your marketing team, your finance team, and your customers.

Last question: you’ve been in this industry long enough to watch it change. What’s the most important shift you’ve seen in how foodservice selling actually works?

The race to the bottom is over. For a long time, selling in foodservice meant competing on price. Who can get to the lowest number fastest? Nobody was really selling; they were just buying business.

That era is done, and pricing transparency killed it. Operators now know what competitive pricing looks like. They can see it. So if you walk in and try to win on price alone, you’ve already lost. The only move left is value. Can you help them make money? Can you solve a problem? Can you bring them something they didn’t know they needed?

That’s not a nice-to-have anymore. It’s the baseline. And you can’t get there without data.

Brian Barbara is the Chief Revenue Officer at Rockenwagner Bakery. He spoke with Datassential at the June 2026 Elevate Experience in Chicago, IL.

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