Buying for 20 stores off a live menu: how Stash Ventures writes orders to the exact number

At a glance

buying managed on Superbud

20 stores

across 96 subcategories

8,600 SKUs

saved per order

2-4 hrs

career retail buyer

26 yrs

The operator

Stash Ventures is a 20-store Michigan cannabis retailer. Don VanZandt is their Demand Planning and Vendor Relations Manager, a 26-year career retail buyer who spent nearly two decades buying headwear for Lids and Legends Global before bringing that discipline to cannabis. He runs buying across all 20 stores: 8,600 SKUs, 96 subcategories, and roughly 2,200 purchase orders a month, all engineered around one goal, never stock out.

The challenge

In cannabis, menus arrive every which way: text messages, photos of product, disorganized "trapper" emails, and LeafLink dumps where the pricing never matches his accounts and inventory is out of sync. Reconciling stale menus against a 20-store demand plan is punishing, and broken orders, where you order a product and it simply doesn't arrive, throw every store's balance off. For a buyer writing thousands of POs a month, that friction compounds fast.

With Superbud Order

Don orders Strait-Fire, one of Stash's everyday drivers, through Superbud, and the difference is the live menu. He can see, down to the package, how many cases are actually available, tied to something live rather than a stale morning export. That means he writes his order to the exact number that's there. Overriding and broken orders fall away, and so do the secondary, third, and fourth emails about swaps and approvals. That ripple effect saves him two to four hours per order cadence, close to a full day on a two-week cycle.

Overriding orders doesn't happen with Superbud. I know exactly what's there and I can write to that number. If you're SKU heavy, it's a no-brainer.

The moment it clicked

When Strait-Fire changed reps, the new rep could only send a back-end LeafLink-style PDF, an unsortable dump Don couldn't copy from or work against. While the rep tried to produce something usable, Don just opened Superbud and placed the order himself. He was done before a workable menu ever arrived, saving an easy hour on the spot and turning an "I don't have time for this" into a completed order.

Why it matters

• True live availability: he orders to the exact cases on hand, not a stale menu.
• Fewer broken orders: what he orders is what lands, so 20 stores' balances stay clean.
• Kills the back-and-forth: no chain of swap-and-approve emails; two to four hours saved per order.
• Built for SKU-heavy catalogs: he clips through far more inventory than a traditional menu allows.
• Resilient: when a vendor's own menu fell apart, the platform was the reliable path to a placed order.