[W]holeshare, an Internet-based food wholesaler, is gaining popularity among Vermonters who buy natural and organic foods. The company is a free online system that automates purchasing for food buying clubs.
Whether the enterprise poses a threat or simply an alternative to the state’s food co-operatives remains an open question.
The company, founded in 2009, serves about 200 buying groups, mostly in New York. It has operated in Vermont since March and presently sells to buying clubs – also known as preorder co-ops — in Burlington, Waterbury, Berlin, Bethel, Brandon, Middletown Springs, Rutland, Athens, Fair Haven, and Bennington.
Rob Fish, the outreach director for Wholeshare, says the website is designed to save shoppers time. A typical household, he says, visits two supermarkets and one or two specialty vendors, like CSA (community-supported agriculture) farmers, ethnic markets, co-ops, or farmers markets a week.
“Our goal is to replace one of the two supermarket visits for each of our customers,” Fish said. “There are people in Vermont who have to drive an hour to get to a full-service grocery. With Wholeshare, anyone can run their own natural foods store out of their garage.”
Wholeshare typically sells products for 18 percent less than the list price at United Natural Foods, of Providence, Rhode Island, the largest supplier of natural foods in the Northeast, Fish says. Wholeshare orders from UNFI via Honest Green, the supplier’s e-commerce division. The orders are shipped by UPS, which is less expensive than UNF’s cost to truck the products, he said.
The online food-buying service uses other suppliers, too, such as North Springfield-based Black River Produce.
Once a buying club’s members have ordered enough to meet a given supplier’s minimum, Wholeshare places the order. This can mean multiple shipments, from individual suppliers, but Fish said, “we work with group coordinators to schedule deliveries around the same time, with the goal of having everything arrive on the same day.”
Private natural foods stores can use Wholeshare to stock their shelves if they can’t reach minimums enforced by other distributors. Often stores coordinate buying clubs. Since many Wholeshare items must be ordered in full cases, the store rounds out club members’ orders that total less than a case with orders for the store. As the buying club’s coordinator, the store receives a small commission for each order.
“It is kind of like a co-op, even though it’s in cyberspace,” said Karen Allen, who runs the Old Barn Hollow natural foods store in Binghamton, New York, in a YouTube video. She limits her store’s stock to items produced within 100 miles of Binghamton, but coordinates the buying club to give her patrons access to produce, for example, that comes from farther away. Club members who come in to pick up orders also buy local items at the store, she said.
Wholeshare got rave reviews from Kelly McElheny, who coordinates the new preorder co-op at Bennington’s Southshire Community Market, which just completed its second ordering cycle. “We have over 16,000 products available to our customers,” McElheny said. “We have four different vendors that we work with now. And it’s just going crazy.”
Other natural foods stores see Wholeshare as potential competition.
Kari Bradley, the general manager for Hunger Mountain Co-op in Montpelier, said Wholeshare could be “an attractive option for people.”
“There’s clearly a trend toward convenience,” Bradley said. “People want to be able at times not to spend as much time as people have in the past shopping.”
Price remains the most obvious point of vulnerability. The co-op, which has staff and overhead costs has “limited ability to reduce prices,” as Bradley wrote in a recent co-op newsletter.
Fish maintains that Wholeshare won’t undermine the customer base for local co-ops.
“We don’t see ourselves as competition for small natural-foods stores or co-ops,” Fish said. “They are more than welcome to use us as an online ordering system. We also encourage them to start a buying club, which is how many of the co-ops started in the first place.”
Bradley said he had not yet noticed customer migration to Wholeshare, and he said certain cultural factors work in the favor of Hunger Mountain, which has more than 7,000 members. The Capital City Grange’s Wholeshare group in Central Vermont has 56 member households.
“My sense of things in Vermont is that there’s a social element to shopping,” Bradley said. “That’s certainly true at our co-op. That is something different from an [urban] place where your choice is between Costco and some other big grocery.”
He also pointed to the instant gratification of seeing a real live bunch of basil and buying it, rather than waiting days for a delivery. “We as American consumers are pretty used to the luxury of getting what we what when we want it. Will people give that up to save some money?”
And navigating the Wholeshare website is cumbersome. The company advertises the availability of more than 13,000 items, and it’s easy to get lost. Mysterious abbreviations invited questions – “rp” for “retail pack” and “Vtbw” for Westfield’s Butterworks Farm. Basil was advertised at $14.39 for a “12-count,” but there was no way of telling how much basil came in a “count.” The catalog offered an extra virgin olive oil at $58.86 a liter, but the next entry offered the same item for $10.75 a liter.
Fish said “most of these [issues] will likely be solved” by the first week of July. “Most pricing errors and areas where abbreviations should be spelled out,” he said, “have been noted and are on a list of things to be fixed over the next few weeks. In the meantime, we’re honoring prices that favor the groups.”
Battle of the Pennies
A price comparison conducted the week of June 22, for a basket of 10 grocery items on the Wholeshare catalog and at Hunger Mountain, found Wholeshare was 9 percent cheaper. Wholeshare’s website advertises a savings of 20 percent to 30 percent off supermarket prices.
The results:
