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Ok, so you’ve got your great product samples, you’re casually dressed, it’s 7:00 am in the morning and your ready to go to your first Whole Foods Market.  First tip, always ask for the team leader.  Reason why I say this is because if the leader is not around they will refer you to an assistant leader.  Now the assistant leader may be a nice guy or girl (and most are) they do not have purchasing power.  So if you leave a sample with an assistant, odds are it will never make it to the leader for a decision.  If the team leader is not in, give a sample to the assistant (they will appreciate it), find out when the leader is working and come back with another sample for your team leader.

You  can meet the team leader anywhere in the store, don’t feel awkward about standing right in a food aisle presenting to your leader while customers are walking around.  If the leader likes your product he will ask you if you are local.  ”Yes!”  This is the magic answer.  Leaders love to support local businesses.  He will ask you how you will deliver.  ’Direct’ is the correct answer, meaning you will likely drive it yourself to the store.  ’Are you in the system?’  The leader will ask.  This is a tricky one, because if this is your first store then the only way you can get on the shelves is to have someone in the regional office put you in the system.  And the only way you can do that is to have a leader who believes in your product send it over on your behalf.  This means you have to be ready with proof of insurance, business docs, bar code, and an ingredients listing sheet that proves all of your ingredients are approved by Whole Foods Market.  The regional office will also set you up with direct deposit to get paid.  Now the first leader of your first store is going to have to do a lot of work to get you in the system.  This guy will launch your entire career at Whole Foods, no other leader will have to work as hard for you as your first leader. Every leader after that is an easier sell.  And when you’ve gotten in to three stores you can petition regional to put you in DVO.  What is DVO?  Google it now to find out, or stay tuned – Next up.  First delivery

Team Mandel Blog How to get in to Whole Foods

So unless you are a well heeled super funded food start-up you will unlikely get an audience with your regional Whole Foods market office.  There are 11 regions for Whole Foods Market across the United States.  Here is a listing of all of them. The best approach for a small start-up is the grass roots approach, which means going store to store, one by one, trying to get them to carry your product.  Now not all grocery chains allow this, in fact, most do not.  But Whole Foods is different.  They like the experience for the shopper to be slightly different at each store.  So if you’re local, you’re encouraged to go right to your store and pitch your product.  Yeah, it seems a little awkward, but this is the way to do it in the beginning.  So here are a few tips before you walk blind in to your local Whole Foods Market.

#1.  Whole Foods uses the term, ‘ Leader .’  So never go in and ask for ‘The manager,’ or the ‘The buyer’

If you are trying to sell an item that belongs in the grocery section – go to any cashier and ask for ‘The Grocery Leader.”  For bakery, “The Bakery Leader” and so on.  The are very informal at Whole Foods, so it’s cool to say ‘Hey, who’s the person I try to sell my stuff too?”

#2. Dress code .  Remember, the Grocery Leaders are regular working folks.  I find alot more common ground when I’m dressed as casual as they are, usually jeans and a t-shirt.  And, if this is your product, your baby, you should go in yourself to show it.  The Grocery Leader will respect you for that.  Save the fancy clothes and sales teams for when you are big time, when you need to present for national distribution.

#3.  Grocery Leaders work early in the morning.  The Grocery Leader that I sold Aunt Erma’s Mandel Bread too works from 5:30 am to 1:30 pm.  This is good news for those of you that have a ‘day job.’  If you don’t mind getting up early, you’ll have a good shot at a face to face with a Grocery Leader before the store usually opens for business, and still have plenty of time to get to your day job.  If it’s your first time, don’t be afraid to drive up to the loading dock (usually at the back of the store) and ask for the Leader.

Coming up next.  What do I say?  What will they ask?

Team Mandel Blog How to get in to Whole Foods

This is also a good time to think about your pricing.

I used google docs to create a spreadsheet of all my costs.  I made assumptions on production.  For example, if I bake two cases of mandel bread per hour (twelve boxes per case) in the rental kitchen, and the kitchen costs twenty five dollars per hour, then I should expect about one dollar per box to pay for the kitchen rental (twenty-four boxes in one hour equals twenty-four dollars).  I used the same model for employees.  One ten dollar an hour baker costs me about forty cents per box if they are baking two cases per hour (forty cents per box times twenty four equals nine dollars and sixty cents).  For every worker I add another forty cents per box.  The cost of product liability insurance is averaged across the ten thousand boxes I was required to purchase.  I included a percentage for distribution….cardboard boxes…and of of course raw ingredients.  Then add in my profit margin to come up with a wholesale cost.  With this type of spreadsheet it is easy to figure out how to lower costs to be more efficient.  For example, the price of flour goes down if I buy a larger volume.  The eggs are cheaper at Costco than buying through the distributor.  And maybe there is a way to streamline the baking so we can bake more than two cases per hour.

Whole Foods Market likes to maintain an average margin of around forty two percent, some items are higher (like bakery), and some slightly lower (like grocery).  This means that if you sell your great cookies to Whole Foods Market for four dollars a box, Whole Foods will add around forty two percent mark up or more to come up with their retail price.  This is important to consider, because before you dive head first in to your great cookie venture, remember that this is a volume business.  Say you go to the store and buy some low priced item like say a Lara Bar for about one dollar and fifty-nine cents.  The stores mark up is around sixty-seven cents, which means Lara Bar sells to Whole Foods for about ninety three cents per bar or less.  Lara Bar factors in the costs for raw materials, manufacturing, advertising and distribution, and their margins are very low.  I’m going to take a guess and say twenty cents cents a bar.  So the only way Lara Bar can be successful is to be huge.  Which they are of course.  You will spend a tremendous amount of time developing and getting your product to market, but until you are a regional, or national – it’s alot of output for a little return.  But don’t be discouraged, in 2001 Famous Amos cookies generated an estimated 100 M in sales, in 2001!  That’s 100 hundred million!  Wally ‘Famous’ Amos himself started as an agent in Hollywood, who would bring homemade cookies to his client meetings, as a calling card.  But Wally understood the value of brand, and so you should always think of your product as a great brand, that happens to taste good, instead of just a great recipe that everybody loves.  There is no value in a great recipe, but huge potential in a great brand.

Team Mandel Blog How to get in to Whole Foods Famous Amos, Food, Wally Amos, Whole Foods Market

My great product!

” My wife makes the best cookies!  She could sell them in stores. ”  Let’s start from scratch. Getting your great product in to a store like Whole Foods can be challenging, but not impossible. For anyone considering a run at Whole Foods Market you must first check out their list of unapproved ingredients .  Make sure your product has none of that stuff, or it will be flat out rejected.  And be careful to check sub-ingredients.  Aunt Erma’s original recipe mandel bread was made with Nestle mini morsels, but we discovered that Netsle’s mini chips had ‘vanillin’ and not ‘vanilla.’  Vanillin is on Whole Foods unapproved list, so we found a chocolatier (Wilbur Chocolate in Lititz, PA) that made an all natural chip virtually identical in size to Nestle’s.  If you are trying to figure out where to print your package, get a nutritional panel,..stuff like that, refer to this blog post for all you ever wanted to know about getting your product ready for the shelves.  By the way, when thinking about packaging, think about the way your package will sit on the shelf.  If it lies flat, is the logo and item name visible?

Team Mandel Blog How to get in to Whole Foods Chocolate Chips, Food, Sales, Whole Foods Market

Forward:

I don’t know anything about the food business.  Aunt Erma’s Mandel Bread began at my work computer.  Bored from staring at the computer screen all day, I started goofing around in photoshop.  I made a fake mandel bread box and a fake web site.  Before I knew it I was invited to pitch my package design on CNBC on a show called “The Big Idea With Donny Deutsch.”  I had no real package, it was all a fake, just clever photoshop work to make it look real.  The mandel bread box Donny held up on TV was printed on my inkjet printer, complete with fake bar code and fake nutritional panel.  The mandel bread he tasted was baked by my wife in our kitchen at home.  Donny had no idea, but he loved it!  By the beginning of 2009 I convinced myself that I should make real boxes, maybe even form a real company.  By September of 2009 Aunt Erma’s World Famous Mandel Bread landed its’ first Whole Foods Market, in Beverly Hills.  We sold out our first day on the shelves.  Today, we are not ‘big time’ not by any stretch.  Comfortably holding at four Whole Foods Markets in Los Angeles (for reasons which will be explained later), we are now working with a large cookie manufacturer to try and scale up Aunt Erma’s production to handle not just a few stores, but an entire region.  And all of this on a product that most people have never heard of.  ’Man dell bread?’ No, it’s ‘mondel bread.’  But say the word mandel bread to a Jewish person and you will stir up nostalgic memories of grandma baking in the kitchen.  I heard a great quote from an entrepreneur who said “Your business is a story wrapped around you.”  Aunt Erma’s Mandel Bread is a story of a long lost recipe, nostalgia, family and home.  Never heard of mandel bread?  That’s ok, there was a time in American history when no one ever heard of a bagel either.  And there was a time in history when no one ever heard of a photocopier.  But it was the genius of Xerox to instill their brand so deeply in the American subconscience that today you’re just as likely to say “I need a xerox of this” than “I need a photocopy of this.”  If we ever make that leap, if mandel bread ever becomes ubiquitous for ‘a better tasting biscotti,’ I hope that people won’t think ‘mandel bread’, but will think Aunt Erma’s.

No doubt if you’re reading this blog you may have dreamed of bringing your favorite family recipe to market.  Is it a cookie?  A great BBQ sauce, or the most incredible cakes ever?  Well here it is, here’s how I got in.  As this story goes so does my little mandel bread company.  You will see links in this online guide, mostly too earlier posts from the last two years I have kept this blog.  So get your recipe ready, it’s time to hit the shelves!

Phil Weinstein

Founder Aunt Erma’s mandel Bread

Team Mandel Blog How to get in to Whole Foods Chocolate, CNBC, Donny Deutsch, Mandel Bread, Sales, Whole Foods Market

The complete online guide…. Coming soon to Team Mandel Blog !

a special thanks to the over 400 hundred unique readers who checked in last month

to read our journey in to the food biz.

Comments are turned off (too much spam) so, if you want to contact me it’s phil@auntermas.com

or on twitter @philweinstein

Team Mandel Blog How to get in to Whole Foods

Beverly Hills ordered 2 more cases of Aunt Erma’s finest, but flooding in our home has prevented us from doing much more than my day job, and managing the task of fixing the house back up.  Fantasy Cookie received the recipe and ingredients on Monday (with full NDA’s signed).  It’s their move now, testing the mandel bread, see if they can make it the way we do it at home.  We’re hoping to make the switch to co-pack manufacturing. The cookie factory benefits are so great, their inside wrapping process should give Aunt Erma’s Mandel Bread a 4-6 month shelf life, and they’re certified kosher dairy. These 2 elusive things (shelf life and kosher certification) have plagued us from the start. We are approaching the 10 month mark from when we received our mandel bread boxes. End of September is when we started at Whole Foods (Beverly Hills), so the goal now is to see if at the one year mark from when we received our packages if we can get Whole Foods to try us out regionally.  Btw – for those people starting any business in California, remember that the state has a minimum annual $800.00 fee for businesses, but if you are a new business, and elect to become an S-Corporation, then the fee is waived the first year.  That means, if you decide to form an LLC or a C-Corp from the start, you get whacked the $800 bucks right away.  Reason why I mention this is because we are approaching the one year mark of incorporating Aunt Erma’s, which also means that we are now on the hook for $800 (due March 15th) to the state.  Ugh…

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Another link, looks like a fascinating documentary.  Check it out.

THE COVE

Team Mandel Blog Development Countdown

Another favorite and inspiring source is the web show “This Week In Start-Ups” with Jason Calacanis.  In this episode, watch LA native Jason Nazar talk about how he maxed out his credit cards to start ‘DocStoc.  Jason’s company has become a big success and now he hosts local meet-ups in Santa Monica.  Waiting this week to get the baking test done from the cookie manufacturer…

Team Mandel Blog Development Countdown