Parts Town Makes San Antonio Acquisition, Partners with Uber for Delivery

The news just keeps coming out of Parts Town.

The distributor of OEM foodservice equipment parts made a pair of announcements this week — one on the acquisition front and another about bolstering its delivery capabilities.

On Aug. 3, the Addison, Illinois-based company said that it has acquired Commercial Kitchen Parts & Service, a fellow distributor of OEM foodservice parts based in San Antonio, Texas and founded in 1946. Commercial Kitchen president Brock Coleman and director of corporate operations David Duckworth will continue to lead the business, which will operate under the same brand name and run as a standalone company within PT Holdings.

“Commercial Kitchen Parts & Service has a strong OEM parts distribution capability, great leadership, an exceptional brand, and high-integrity leadership,” said David Wenger, group president of PT Holdings. “We have been incredibly impressed with Brock Coleman and his team and admired the business for years. We are thrilled to have Commercial Kitchen Parts & Service join the PT Holdings family.”

“We are excited to become part of this great group of companies,” Coleman added. “We have known the PT team for many years and admire what they’ve built. I also appreciate the integrity that they demonstrated throughout this process, doing everything they said they would do. We are looking forward to the next chapter of Commercial Kitchen Parts & Service and the opportunities that this combination will bring to our team, our manufacturers, and our customers.”

The news follows two recent acquisitions for Parts Town in the residential appliance parts market: Encompass Supply Chain Solutions (announced April 5) and Dayton Appliance Parts (April 22), and 13 months after the company acquired fellow foodservice parts distributor General Parts.

Uber Partnership & Marketplace Update

On Aug. 1, Parts Town announced a pilot program with Uber Technologies that will provide two-hour, last-mile service to Chicago-area foodservice operators and service technicians.

The partnership begins with delivery from Parts Town’s Addison distribution center, and the company said it represents the industry’s first collaboration between a parts distributor and a ride-sharing provider to offer replacement parts delivery.

The company said that its Parts in Town B2B marketplace — launched in January 2020 — has now scaled to nearly 10,000 orders per month. The online portal for OEM foodservice equipment parts, accessories, and consumables is experiencing double-digit growth month-over-month and has had over 57,000 transactions to date. Meanwhile, Parts Town has more than 90 Parts in Town locations across North America that sell their local OEM parts inventory on partstown.com.

“We are very excited that our marketplace is scaling rapidly,” said Emanuela Delgado, who leads development at Red Lightning Group, Parts Town’s innovation division. “This partnership with Uber is just one of the ways we will support local service companies and our manufacturer partners by getting OEM parts into the local market faster than ever. In addition, more than 87% of the orders coming in through Parts In Town are new customers for that participating service business, giving the local service company a great opportunity to grow their service business.”

“Uber is committed to Chicago’s food service industry, including the thousands of Uber Eats restaurant partners who call the city home, which makes working with the eCommerce innovators at Parts Town so exciting,” added Meghan Musbach, General Manager for Uber Eats in the Midwest. “This partnership won’t just benefit the food service industry and its customers, but brings new earning opportunities to the tens of thousands of Chicago-area drivers who help people, meals, groceries — and now mission-critical replacement parts — arrive at their destinations.”

This past May 4, Parts Town shared that its 2021 revenue increased 33% vs. 2020, vaulting its annual revenue to $1 billion. The company said it expects 2022 revenues to surpass $1.8 billion.