"It feels like that local, personal touch is going away," said one Nevada maker of pasta sauce. "It's hard to set ourselves apart anymore in the sea of well-known national brands."
Whole Foods Markets is placing new limits on how products are sold in its stores and asking suppliers to help pay for the changes, riling some small-scale vendors who have long depended on the grocer for visibility and shelf space.
The changes, outlined in an email recently sent to the company's suppliers, are intended to save on costs and centralize operations. They come as Whole Food's new owner, Amazon.com, pushes to reduce prices at the chain's 473 stores.
Some owners of small businesses say they're already feeling the effect.
Valerie Gray, for instance, began selling her pasta sauce, Italian Heart's Gourmet Foods, to the Whole Foods store in Reno, Nevada, four years ago. For years, she said, the grocer allowed her to display 108 bottles of pasta sauce at a time. A professional photograph of Gray and her husband hung from the ceiling, alongside a sign that read "Made Locally."
But in the past month, that photo has come down, Gray said, and the shelves now accommodate just 36 bottles of sauce as the store makes room for national brands. Sales of Gray's pasta sauce have dropped by 75 percent in the past month, she said.
"It feels like that local, personal touch is going away," she said, adding that Whole Foods accounts for half of the company's sales.
"It's hard to set ourselves apart anymore in the sea of well-known national brands."
Previously, Whole Foods allowed suppliers like Gray to oversee their own merchandise or hire local firms to do so. But under the new rules, Whole Foods is requiring suppliers to work exclusively with Daymon, a Stamford, Connecticut-based retail strategy firm, and its subsidiary, SAS Retail Services, to schedule in-store tastings, check inventory on shelves and create displays on their behalf. (Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, also owns The Washington Post.)
"For the last two years, we have been working to streamline our processes to ensure all our suppliers are supported and set up for success," Don Clark, general vice president of purchasing for nonperishables, said in a statement.
Some suppliers said the new policies put them at a disadvantage because they rely on regular three-hour demonstrations and tastings to introduce products that might be unfamiliar to shoppers.
"Right now, you can set up your table and sample away," said Jenna Huntsberger, owner of Whisked, a Washington, D.C.-based company that sells cookies, quiches and pies to area Whole Foods stores. "So many small brands have gotten their start like that, and shoppers love that they can walk by and meet the person who made their food."
The changes are also likely to affect a cottage industry of companies that act as liaisons between local suppliers and sellers such as Whole Foods.