Project Overview
Commodities
Practices
- Education and Training: networking, technical assistance
- Farm Business Management: farm-to-institution, farm-to-restaurant, marketing management, new enterprise development, value added
- Sustainable Communities: food access and security, food hubs, local and regional food systems, new business opportunities, partnerships
Abstract:
Over the last decade, REAP has worked with institutional wholesale buyers to identify some of their greatest barriers to local purchasing. Through that work we saw single-source purchasing platforms, where local products could be purchased directly from multiple providers, as a clear solution to existing sourcing issues. We 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. While we had the beta platform, and some larger farmers interested in using it, we were missing representation from small farms who lack traditional opportunities in wholesale spaces. With this grant, we brought on two cohorts of small-scale 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 connects farmers and institutional buyers on a market network platform. Maize started with a direct-to-consumer focus, and has expanded to build an interactive wholesale marketplace while implementing some lessons that REAP learned on our own platform. The farmer-informed open market launched at the end of April 2026, and we hosted a vendor showcase to support that launch in June 2026.
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. FoodShed is formally opening in August of 2026.
Project objectives:
- 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 in a wholesale market to support other farmers in their transition and improve the wholesale platform.