Progress report for ONC24-151
Project Information
REAP Food Group created a local Wholesale Ready Marketplace with funding from a USDA LFPP grant to facilitate purchasing wholesale quantities of local produce and value-add products by local institutional buyers in southern Wisconsin. The beta version of the Marketplace launched in July 2022, along with a support resource website at wholesaleready.org, and the first 10 producers were onboarding to the Marketplace over the next year. As of Fall 2023, Wholesale Ready Marketplace was set to contribute up to $1,300,000 of locally-produced food to our food system while supporting the growth of diverse, sustainable farms.
With this grant, we brought on two cohorts of producers to onboard to the Wholesale Ready Marketplace and support with wholesale readiness onboarding. Through feedback from the first cohort, who worked with us from the summer of 2024 through March of 2025, we improved our onboarding process to include resources for farmers who need additional support to be ready for wholesale. These resources include additional technical training and on-farm support in implementing best practices for wholesale production. This need was disproportionately shared by black, Hmoob, and indigenous farmers who are growing specialty crops.
We began the process of onboarding our second cohort in April of 2025, and in July of 2025 the host of the marketplace discontinued the platform without warning. We are fortunate to have two projects in our network that support farmers scaling up to sell wholesale, and are working to connect our second cohort to those programs while also offering those opportunities to our first cohort.
The first of those projects is an app and website platform called Maize, which aims to connect farmers and consumers across multiple scales. Maize started with a direct-to-consumer focus, and as they add wholesale markets features we are focusing on sharing lessons from our own website buildout with them to improve their product. They have the flexibility to implement many features we could could not access on our old website, and the end result will be a farmer-informed wholesale platform.
The second of those projects is the FoodShed Partnership, which is an innovative collaboration between nonprofit and for-profit businesses in Madison that is gearing up to act as a food storage and processing hub for area producers. FoodShed is focused on giving wholesale market access to historically underserved farms. We have connected our cohorts with the FoodShed Partnership as they begin to onboard farmers to their storage and processing operations. In working with historically underserved farms, FoodShed is also working with REAP to train and support farmers for upscaling their production and sales.
- Support onboarding eight producers onto a wholesale marketplace through technical training and on-farm support to implement best practices in wholesale production.
- Learn from the experiences of producers transitioning to selling their produce into the wholesale market to develop case studies to share with other farmers.
Cooperators
Research
Educational & Outreach Activities
Participation summary:
The group of 8 producers that we are working with on this grant have onboarded in two cohorts - the first cohort of four producers was identified summer 2024, and we met with them through March of 2025. In the beginning of April 2025 we began to onboard a second cohort of four producers to the program. The first cohort (an apple farmer, a pork farmer, a veggie farmer, and a tortilla producer) completed the intake form (created under a previous grant), which is attached here - Wholesale Onboarding. Of the second cohort (two veggie farmers, a beef farmer, and a salsa producer), three of them have completed the intake form. We will be visiting the fourth farmer to support her with the intake form, as she needs additional tech support.
We had 5 touchpoints with our second cohort by July. In our first meetings with each of them, we collected information on what they were hoping to sell wholesale and how their operations were running. After those meetings, we sent them to our Wholesale Onboarding Survey and had them set up profiles on our Marketplace. The second follow-up happened on both calls and emails, and we discussed how our resources and program could support their goals and growth.
We've created one-pagers on both cohorts to profile them on our Wholesale site as sellers (Wholesale Profiles (1) - one example, the rest are uploaded on our website), as well as for a few other farms in our network that had products on the website. We had also created onboarding guidelines (Profile Best Practices) that are no longer relevant as they were a guide to our old website.
The marketplace website went down in July 2025, and it took the month of August 2025 to figure out what had happened with the data and if we'd be able to re-access the site to retrieve it. Once we learned that we wouldn't be able to access the site again, we requested a download of the data that had been on it and decided to explore next steps.
We are lucky to have two collaborators on this work moving forwards as we pivot without our wholesale platform - FoodShed Partnership and Maize, who are both described above. We met with the co-founder of Maize shortly after finding out that our site was discontinued to make a plan on how we could work together to keep digital wholesale marketplace access for our producer cohorts. We hosted two learning sessions with Maize to showcase how the site was being built out, and invited our growers on a tour of the FoodShed facility in November. There is an additional FoodShed tour coming up in early February, with information sessions in English, Spanish, and Hmoob for interested farmers. Our producer cohorts have been invited to this as well.
We are supporting our cohorts in onboarding to Maize by collecting and uploading vendor data for them, as well as training them on the site through online and in-person training. We will also be transferring our Wholesale Readiness resources (wholesaleready.org) to Maize, as REAP will have an organizational support profile on the platform so that we can continue our work as hands-on support for farmers as they scale up. The opportunity to train with us on the Maize platform is being extended to our first cohort as well.
The vendor showcase that we hoped to have at the end of 2025 was postponed due to the website deactivation, but will be hosted in collaboration with Maize and the FoodShed this coming spring. We are planning to time it with the public launch of the Maize platform in late April or early May, and will be featuring our two cohorts of producers in addition to farmers connected to the FoodShed and Maize.
Learning Outcomes
Connecting with institutional buyers
Preparation to sell wholesale
Improving farm financial tracking
Organizing wholesale inventory
Project Outcomes
Our project is connecting area institutions to local farms that grow either regeneratively or organically, and small-scale producers that buy from such farms. Building these connections is an economic benefit to our producers by introducing them to potential buyers that they had not previously connected with. Encouraging institutional purchasers to buy local has lasting environmental impacts as it decreases the footprint of their culinary programs, and supports the farmers in continuing their work as stewards of their land.