Episode 179: George Milton On The UNFI SSA Controversy

The Checkout speaks with CEO and Co-founder of Yellowbird Hot Sauce about a controversial new supplier policy being rolled out by the grocery industry’s largest natural and organic product wholesaler.

Wholesale is a vast and consolidated sector of the grocery industry that is mostly invisible to consumers, except for seeing their trucks on the roads. United Natural Foods is a public traded wholesaler and the gateway for thousands of CPG brands into retailers such as Whole Foods, Safeway, Wegman’s, Key Foods, food co-op’s and regional supermarkets. Because retailers compete on price and do everything they can to keep costs down and margins up, wholesalers such as UNFI negotiate fixed cost-plus deals to distribute products to these chains. These cost-plus deals are typically well below the cost of doing business for the wholesaler. Wholesalers such as UNFI (or KeHe, C&S, MacLane, Spartan Nash) then make up the difference in margin through supplier marketing programs, confusing supplier fees (such as “deductions and billbacks”) and higher mark-ups to smaller grocery chains that do not have the volume to support cost-plus deals. One new supplier program from UNFI has generated a lot of angst in the grocery industry and hot sauce maven George Milton has things to say about it.

https://medium.com/@George_43822/unfi-ssa-ins-and-outs-for-brands-bb8913e4d1dc

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