How to Sell to Whole Foods & Become a Whole Foods Vendor

Learn everything you need to know to become a Whole Foods vendor

Hi everyone. My name is Karen Waksman and I’m the founder of a company called Retail MBA. And today I want to talk about getting your products sold at Whole Foods. Now, the reason why I decided to create this particular segment is because I teach thousands of product companies across the country on how to get your products into stores. And people always ask me about Whole Foods. They ask me about other retailers but Whole Foods seems to come up often.

So what I wanted to do in this particular segment is to really just empower you and inspire you to succeed by giving you some nuggets of information to help you think through getting your product into that store.

Why you should be selling to Whole Foods

So let’s talk about becoming a Whole Foods supplier.

Well, there’s one thing that I can think off, right off the top of my head that I think is important for you to know. So when you try and sell your products into a major retailers say a WalGreens or a WalMart or you know, some other major retailer. What typically happens is they have one buyer who buys for all of their stores – like typically have one corporate buyer who buys products for all of their stores making it easier to become a Whole Foods vendor.

What you can sell to Whole Foods

So if you have like in a specialty food product there’s typically a specialty food buyer or something to that extent at these major retailers. And the good news is one buyer can buy lots or products or units of your product because they buy for all of their stores.

Whole Foods buys on a regional level

Now the difference between another retailer and Whole Foods is that Whole Foods actually buys on a regional level. Which I actually think is pretty cool especially for a company who kind of new to the field or who, you know, is just getting started with Whole Foods or trying to get products into Whole Foods. Because what that means for you is that you can actually potentially reach out to several different buyers within Whole Foods to potentially get your products into them.

It’s a little tricky to become a Whole Foods vendor

So let me explain.

If you go after a WalGreens or like some other major retailer, right? And you know that buyer doesn’t like your product, you pretty much can’t get your product into that store until another buyer shows up or there’s some other reason why you can’t get that product to that store. So you know the buyer says “No” it kind of shuts you down. 

The advantage of becoming Whole Foods vendor

But with Whole Foods, they set it up regionally. So there’s a buyer who buys products just that region. There’s so many variables of regions that they’re responsible for. So what that means to you is that, you know, there is one buyer for one region, and another buyer for another region, and so forth. So you can conceivably reach out to one buyer at Whole Foods. A buyer can say yes to you: that would be great and you can sell your products to them for that region. Or they could say No to you. But either way you have several other buyers within Whole Foods that you can sell to.

There are many advantages once you become a Whole Foods vendor

My purpose in explaining this to you is that there’s lots of opportunity to sell to Whole Foods. One buyer might not have enough budget to buy your product but in another region, that same buyer, might be able to buy products for that particular region. So the ultimate goal here is to help you make money. And so if you know that, if one Whole foods buyer says No to you, can go to another Whole foods region and find that buyer and reach out to them accordingly.