Wholesale can be a game-changer for farms and food hubs — bringing larger orders, steadier revenue, and stronger customer relationships that boost your visibility in the community.

But if you’re still juggling spreadsheets, emails, and manual data entry, the extra work can overshadow the benefits.

Bringing your wholesale online changes that. Customers consistently tell us that managing wholesale through Local Food Marketplace increases profitability, streamlines day-to-day operations, and elevates customer service.

Below are nine reasons to bring your wholesale business online, and why LFM is the best partner to help you do it.

1. Running Wholesale Online with LFM Saves You Hours Every Week

LFM automates pick lists, packing lists, labels, invoices, and bulk order updates — all while keeping real-time, accurate inventory. With fewer manual steps, your team gets a smoother workflow and dramatically fewer errors.

If you work with multiple producers, our Local Food Connect integration eliminates tedious data entry. Producers can upload their own product availability, pricing, descriptions, and photos, then generate labels and pick/pack lists, update weights and lot numbers, and receive automated order notifications.

As you grow, LFM grows with you. LFM functions as your all-in-one platform with additions such as Advanced Accounting and Advanced Logistics and Packing.  These robust tools are integrated with your producers, customers, and online storefront, and allow your business to grow without overburdening you or your team.

The result? Cleaner data, faster turnaround, and a wholesale business that practically runs itself.

Teresa Kurtak, Co-Owner of California’s Fifth Crow Farm, loves LFM’s ability to print customized packing labels. “We’re California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF) certified, so we have to have certain information on our labels,” she said. Before LFM, Fifth Crow had a printer create generic labels with the required information, but their staff had to write in product information by hand.

“When you’re selling 30 or 40 of something, that process of hand writing every sticker takes a lot of time,” she noted. Now, all that time can be put into customer service and making the business run better.

Rachel Kretchmar with OKC Food Hub in Oklahoma City has always used LFM to run the food hub’s wholesale business, and she can’t imagine managing sales with any other system.

Having your producer management and customer management in one place and not on spreadsheets is incredibly helpful. We work with 15 farms, and it would be really complicated to not have both customers and producers online. Without LFM, we would add so much admin work that I don’t know how our business would be sustainable.”

—Rachel Kretchmar, OKC Food Hub

2. An LFM Storefront is More Convenient for Your Customers

Wholesale buyers work on wildly different schedules. LFM gives them a storefront that’s open 24/7, with live availability and the ability to update orders right up until the deadline. “When our order window opens, school cafeterias are serving lunch,” said Rachel. “They can’t log in and order until later in the afternoon, when they’re in the kitchen. The ease of being able to log in and order 24 hours a day is huge for our customers.”

If you’re only taking orders by phone or text, it’s easy to miss sales. An online storefront with LFM eliminates that risk.

• Customers can update their order up until the order deadline. LFM lets buyers update their order until the order window closes, so they can adjust as their needs change. This improves customer service and boosts sales without creating extra admin work.
• Customers receive automated communication. Your LFM storefront shares clear order deadlines and automates abandoned cart reminders, final order confirmations, delivery reminders, and more via email or SMS to help increase weekly orders and keep customers informed.
• Multiple users can log in to the same wholesale account. LFM enables multiple users to shop in the same account. That means the chef and sous chef at a restaurant can browse and purchase items from one account. We also offer master and sub accounts to serve grocery chains, school districts, and other businesses with multiple locations.

3. Putting Your Wholesale Business Online Creates a Professional Presentation

Your wholesale business is competing with multinational corporations with huge marketing and sales budgets. Most wholesale buyers are used to ordering from online systems. If you can make your process part of their regular workflow, it’s likely to increase your sales.

• LFM offers a professional, customized shopping experience. One of the benefits of working with LFM is that we’ll create a professional, customized storefront that fits seamlessly with your company’s branding. The storefront can display pictures, product descriptions, and attributes such as Certified Organic or Animal Welfare Approved.
• LFM supports customizable payment terms and payment types. You can offer customized payment terms and options for payment types for different types of wholesale buyers straight from the storefront.
• A shopping experience that feels as seamless as ordering from large distributors — but with fresher, more transparent food.

4. Customers Get the Most Accurate Product Information

Static fresh sheets and PDFs quickly fall out of date. LFM brings your fresh sheet to life with:

• Up-to-date availability
• Multiple photos
• Detailed descriptions
• Producer-specific attributes

“We’re big on making sure our producers use photos in their product listings so people have an accurate idea of what they’re getting,” said Rachel. “We have five people who grow bok choy and it’s all different sizes and varieties.” Since OKC Food Hub uses LFM for its online storefront, wholesale customers can view multiple photos of the different varieties, read a description, and pick the bok choy that best suits their needs.

5. Availability is Always Up to Date on an Online Storefront 

How often do you have to call a customer back to say you’re out of something?

With LFM:

• Availability updates instantly with every order. That means shoppers always get accurate information about what and how much you have available.
• Inventory is shared across price lists, sales channels, and selling units. Other platforms require you to split your availability in order to sell it at different prices or sizes. LFM makes it easy to sell to all of your customers (your CSA members and other households, wholesale buyers, and others) from a single inventory or availability.
• You can manage retail, CSA, and wholesale from one unified inventory. When you keep your entire inventory in one place, you’re less likely to sell out of items without realizing it.
• Advanced Inventory handles both stored goods and just-in-time harvest items seamlessly. Many food hubs and farms sell products that are both stored in inventory, such as jars of honey, and items that are harvested just in time for delivery, such as fresh produce. LFM’s Advanced Inventory module allows you to seamlessly manage both product types and ensure your customers know exactly what’s available to them.

6. Keep Food Safety, Insurance, & Certifications in One Place

Wholesale customers often require you to keep detailed information about food safety and organic/other certifications. LFM allows you to store all of that information in one easily accessible place — which is much better than digging through a filing drawer when someone requests it.

7. A Wholesale Sales Platform Reduces Errors

When you work with LFM, items listed from your farm or suppliers, orders from your customers, and the digital or hardcopy information generated for order packing and delivery are all connected.  This ensures that changes made to one part of your supply chain are reflected throughout the process, which vastly reduce human error. 

Before using LFM, it wasn’t uncommon for Fifth Crow to encounter multiple errors on the pack line. Now, mistakes are a rarity.

Using LFM has really reduced our error rate. When a person places an order, the harvest list is directly taken from that data, so there’s no chance of the data being wrong. LFM makes custom labels, so we can check the harvest list against the labels as a check on whether we’ve made a mistake.”

—Teresa Kurtak, Fifth Crow Farm

8. Custom Price Lists & Product Lists Become Easy

It’s likely that you sell products at different prices to different categories of wholesale customers — school districts, hospitals, grocery stores, etc. — and each of them may require a different price markup. Doing this manually is tedious and error-prone. LFM makes it effortless.

You can:

• Create Custom Price Lists with standard markup rules
• Tailor product lists (e.g., organic-only, produce-only, meat-only)
• Give each customer an experience curated to their purchasing needs
• Automatically update lists each week with live availability

James Klett, Co-Owner of Fairgrown Farm in New Jersey, noted that for his business, having standard markup rules in the system really helps. Before he started using LFM, he created price lists weekly and decided how much to charge for each item for different types of customers. “Now, if I’m gone, the team can set prices using our standard markup. It takes the judgement call out of things and makes our pricing more straightforward.”

9. Automated Communications Save You Time

Communication is key to making any business work. It can also be incredibly time-consuming. Investing in the right online system can help you automate many communication tasks.

• Send transactional messages, including order confirmations, delivery reminders, and invoices, by email or SMS
• Create and send marketing messages by email or SMS message
• Auto-generate emails using information you or your producers have already entered into the system
• Send information about sales, discounts, promotions, and other special offers your wholesale buyers might want to take advantage of — customized based on information such as where your buyer is located and the last time they made a purchase

“With our old system, we would send an email to our wholesale customers every week, but it took us an incredible amount of time to generate the message,” said Teresa. That’s because she had to manually add all product information, including descriptions and photographs.

Learn How LFM Can Help Your Wholesale Business

Are you interested in more information about how LFM can help you manage your wholesale business more efficiently, increase sales, and reduce errors? Request your free one-on-one demo today!