Say you have a natural food brand. You've persuaded a distributor that your product is great and they agree that grocery stores will want it on their shelves. But before you do your victory dance, you are confronted with the fact that the distributor's services don't come free — and that managing the deductions the distributor makes, for a variety of promotional and operational reasons, is crucial to your company's bottom line.

To help emerging brands navigating this maze, Naturally Chicago presents Managing Deductions from Distributors, a free webinar that will take place on Wednesday, February 22 at 3:30 central time.

Leading the conversation will be Kyle Barnholt, CEO of TrewUp, a company located in Boulder, Colorado that he founded last summer. TrewUp centers on a proprietary Deduction Management & Analytics platform that uses cloud-based AI technology to simplify the grueling and time-consuming process of analyzing deductions.

Kyle could hardly have a better mentor in the ways of distributors. Brandon Barnholt, his father, is CEO of KeHE, a leading distributor of Good Food and Natural Products, who also is a Naturally Chicago Co-Founder and Board member.

This webinar is a follow-on to the Jan. 17 presentation titled Navigating Trade Spend to Defend Gross Margins. But as Kyle points out, "Traditionally, brands often group all distributor deductions into 'trade spend' in their profit & loss statement. In reality, deductions include both trade and operations expenses including advertising, temporary price reductions, product demonstrations, manufacturer charge-backs, scans, product shorts, logistic fines, fees, cut cases, and product spoils."

Kyle will be joined on the webinar by Catherine Youngblood, Director of Sales, Lundberg Family Farms; Alex Corral, Principal, Accountrepreneur; and Jodie Wing, Chief Retail Sales Officer, Cerebelly.