Selling wholesale
Updated
On this page4
What changes when you cross over
Wholesale is not a bigger version of selling at a market, it is a different business with different constraints, and the first of them usually decides whether you can do it at all. Under most cottage food exemptions you cannot sell wholesale, which makes this a kitchen question before it is a sales question.
| Market stall | Wholesale | |
|---|---|---|
| Kitchen | Often your own | Usually licensed |
| Label | Exemption disclosure | Full compliance, and possibly nutrition facts |
| Grade | Nobody asks | A buyer may |
| Case pack | Loose jars are fine | Cases, consistent and palletisable |
| Price | Retail | Roughly half of it |
The arithmetic that catches people
A wholesale price is roughly half a retail one and the costs do not halve with it. That gap is survivable at volume and brutal at small volume, which is the opposite of the order most makers arrive at it in. Work the numbers at the quantity actually being offered rather than at the quantity you hope follows.
A wholesale price is about half the retail one, and the costs that were fixed do not halve. On a product whose main input is set at 45 parts fruit by regulation, there is less room to absorb that than in most categories, which is why what to charge has to be answered for both channels before you take the first account.
What a buyer will ask for
Buyers have a standard list and none of it is negotiable. Having it ready turns a conversation that stalls into one that closes. Assemble it before the first approach rather than in response to one, because the gap between being asked and being able to answer is where most first wholesale conversations die.
A consistent case pack, a lot code they can trace, a shelf-life statement and liability insurance. The first two come out of your batch records and the last is on insurance.