FARMWISE Resources: Wholesale Produce Guide

Selling into wholesale markets is an opportunity for producers to streamline their markets and potentially achieve more stability than with farmers markets and other direct to consumer opportunities.

How Do We Define Wholesale?

Generally speaking, wholesale markets allow farmers to:

• Sell more produce to fewer buyers

• Farmers may specialize, grow less types of crops, and have larger orders

• Potentially have less packaging, marketing, and labor expense

Wholesale markets are different from farmers markets because:

• Delivery and packaging needs

• Grading and count/pound requirement per box

• Purchase price per box

• Potential need for longer shelf life

• There may be contracts or bidding needed

There are 3 main challenges to consider:

• Logistics- invoicing/labeling/payment/late delivery

• Quality Issues- over blemished/under or over ripe/incorrect bunch size/poor variety

• Produce Standards- not graded/not cooled/underweight

The FARMWISE Indiana Wholesale Produce Guide will help simplify the steps of grading and packing for wholesale buyers to support farmer success.

This template was created by the Northwest Indiana Food Council and designed by Grapevine Local Food Marketing. We thank them for allowing us to edit their template for this purpose.