The quarterly product release webinar is where Pepper's product leads come out from behind the changelog and show what shipped - live. 

The last 90 days were huge, with updates across all four product lines, a handful of hardware debuts, and a few long-requested features finally going live. If you missed the session, here's the recap.

Storefront: More Control Over the Customer Experience

David Curry, walked through four updates, each aimed at giving distributors more flexibility in how their customers order, what customers can see on the order guide, and how promotions show up inside the app.

Line item notes

Customers can now attach notes to individual items on an order, not just the order as a whole. There are two fields: 

• Memos: A private memo that stays within the customer's account (useful for internal reminders like "great for grab-and-go")
• Requests: A request that passes through with the order to the ERP and shows up on the order email. 

Notes can be locked down to DSRs only, so customers can't make requests that can't be fulfilled, which matters a lot for distributors who want to control expectations. The feature is available across every Storefront package.

Stackable badges

Badges, icons that appear next to items on the order guide, used to be limited to one per item. Now distributors can add as many as they want and stack-rank them, so the most important ones show up first in space-constrained views.

Par sheets that match the order guide

Distributors can now print par sheets based on the exact sort order set up in the customer's order guide. If a customer has organized their guide by kitchen workflow (e.g. cheese, meat, prep section), the printed par sheet mirrors that structure. 

Multi-discount promotions

The biggest Storefront update, and the one that won the audience poll at 64%. Previously, a single promotion could only carry one discount type. Now distributors can combine a buy-nine-get-one-free deal, a percent-off discount, and a fixed-price offer into a single promo tile. If a distributor runs a monthly flyer with 25 different items at 25 different price points, they can surface all of it in one place instead of fragmenting it across dozens of tiles.

Also shipping: Multi-order-guide ingestion from the ERP (distributors with multiple order guides per customer no longer have to consolidate them), configurable "Become a Customer" flows that can point to a distributor's own onboarding form, and more robust product catalog update tooling.

Sales Hub: Built for the Rep Keying Orders All Day

Alan Opened the Sales Hub section with a candid observation: Pepper has a lot of tools to help reps recover and grow accounts (lost item alerts, discovered items, customer browsing activity), but a lot of reps don't use them because they're still spending most of their day keying in orders in a separate order entry tool like PowerCell, Salesnet, or Poet. Fragmented workflows mean reps default to what's fastest, not what's best.

The Q1 release is aimed squarely at that problem.

A new rep-first order entry page

Where the standard Storefront experience is image-heavy and optimized for operators browsing a catalog, the new rep view is dense, keyboard-driven, and configurable. Arrow keys to navigate, tab to move between fields, slash to search the order guide, enter to expand into the full catalog, R to open the cart, C to complete the order, shift-enter to submit. All without touching the mouse. Columns are fully configurable — next PO, on-hand inventory, sales cost, buyer name, anything that exists at the item level can be surfaced.

This was the top-ranked update in the Sales Hub poll, and for good reason: it's the first version of Pepper's order entry built specifically to compete with the keyboard-heavy tools reps are used to.

Live commission estimates

As a rep builds an order, their estimated commission updates in real time in the bottom summary bar. Pepper configures this to mirror whatever commission structure the distributor runs. Early data from rollouts: reps who can see their commissions live tend to raise their commission rate by about 2% on average. Visibility changes behavior.

Also shipping: Route and stop on the account details page, assigned sales rep visibility (useful for managers, admins, and inside sales teams placing orders on behalf of reps), and a sales rep task manager currently in pilot. 

The DSR order entry panel is available across most Sales Hub packages. If you don't see it turned on yet, your CS rep can enable it.

Finance Hub: End-to-End AR Is Officially Here

Alvaro walked through what might be the biggest Finance Hub expansion since launch. The short version: Pepper now supports every form of AR distributors need.

Check scanning

Pepper now supports check scanning hardware. Scanned checks flow into a new Process Checks page in the Pepper Management Center, where they can be matched to customers and reconciled against open invoices in the same workflow as direct charge. Amounts apply to the oldest open invoice first by default, with full override control. Once a check is matched to a customer, Pepper remembers the association, and every future check from that customer is auto-matched.

Check scanning won the Finance Hub poll handily. It's the feature distributors have been asking about longest, and it's the one that finally closes the loop.

In-person card terminals

Pepper now supports countertop card readers, including swipe, chip, tap, with receipt printing and long battery life. A new Terminals page in the PMC lets distributors pull up a customer, select open invoices, send the total to the terminal, and take the payment. Credit card surcharges are applied automatically based on card type. For any distributor with a cash-and-carry operation, in-person pickups, or curbside payments, this removes the need to manually key card numbers. No integration changes required, if Finance Hub is already set up, the hardware drops in.

A mobile card reader, a smaller tap-only device that pairs with a phone or tablet, is coming within the next few weeks. That version will work from inside Pepper's driver and sales rep apps, so drivers and DSRs can collect payment in the field using the same invoice-level workflow customers already use in the storefront.

Branded card

Distributors on Finance Hub can now launch their own white-labeled credit card, with a logo on the card, distributor-specific cashback rates, accelerated rewards on the SKUs they want to move all inside their white-labeled Pepper app. Card processing runs at less than half of what most distributors pay today, and the program includes receipt reconciliation software for the restaurant operator on the other side. This is less of a feature and more of a new business line for any distributor who wants it. Reach out to learn more.

Order Agent: The Model Keeps Learning

Angela closed the webinar with Order Agent updates. The theme: Pepper's model is getting measurably better at processing orders, and the tooling around it is catching up.

Voice note support

Order Agent now accepts voice notes alongside text, voicemail, email, photo, and PDF. WhatsApp voice notes count too - which matters, because a meaningful share of distributor-customer communication happens there. Every major language is supported (Spanish, French, and yes, per the audience's request, likely Klingon too). For orders that come in as forwarded iPhone or Android voicemails, Order Agent will ingest and transcribe those directly.

Upgraded swap experience

Every item in an Order Agent draft now has a swap button that opens a filtered catalog view with substitute candidates pre-surfaced. Previous substitutions show up at the top. If a swap is temporary (e.g. a distributor is out of stock on the exact SKU a customer ordered) unchecking the Remember selection for future orders box keeps the customer's default preference intact.

The Order Agent dashboard 

A new dashboard tracks orders submitted, orders per week against a configurable baseline, perfect orders (orders where every line item is correct without any rep intervention), median processing time, and accuracy breakdowns. Distributors can drill into where the model is assigning different items or quantities than expected, which is how the feedback loop stays productive.

Line item notes flow through

Because Order Agent sits on top of Storefront, the new line item note feature from Storefront is available inside the Order Agent cart too. A customer who asks for "ripe mangoes only" in a voicemail gets that request attached to the order without a rep ever leaving Order Agent.

What's Coming

A few teases for the next 90 days:

• Holiday override for Storefront. Memorial Day weekend is the first test, so customers can still place orders when their normal delivery date falls on a holiday.
• Mobile card readers for drivers and sales reps in the field, enabling in-person payment collection inside the driver and rep apps.
• Cash payment marking in Finance Hub, completing the "mark as paid" workflow for every payment type.
• Expanded PMC filter and search tooling for promotions and other back-office views.

If you couldn't make the live session and want a walkthrough of any of this in the context of your own operation, reach out to your CS rep, or drop us a note. The next product release webinar is in 90 days. We'll see you there.

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