About this System

New products and fresh ideas are very important to Whole Foods Market. We’re proud that every month hundreds of entrepreneurs and manufacturers bring their product ideas to our Northern California regional purchasing team.

Their innovations are so important to us that our regions decided it was time to make things easier for these individuals and manufacturers to bring new products to our buyers by creating this online system to manage the new product submission process.

This new system:

• Helps you connect your product to the right department and buyer in our regions
• Gives you information about our purchasing process, standards, timetable and category needs
• Tells you the information we need to decide whether to purchase your product
• Standardizes and simplifies the process of submitting a new product application
• Manages the process of sending us samples

This system entirely replaces the previous process for bringing new product ideas to buyers in all categories in our region with two exceptions:

• Manufacturers selling bulk ingredients to our prepared foods businesses through a third party distributor (e.g., Sysco).
• Farmers and others selling produce that is distributed through our Watsonville or San Francisco facilities. If this exception applies to you, contact our San Francisco Distribution Center or Watsonville Produce Procurement offices.

We believe the new system will make it much easier for our buyers to respond promptly to important questions from vendors by allowing them to focus solely on sourcing great products and fresh ideas for our stores.

We now actively discourage unsolicited boxes of product or samples. Unsolicited boxes of product or samples will not be reviewed.

Buyers will still have regular meetings with brokers, attend trade shows, and in other ways communicate personally with vendors. However, this web site is the only way to submit products for consideration as a core regional item.