Blog
Mar 28, 2025
Working within the UNFI platform
United Natural Foods, Inc. (UNFI) is one of the largest wholesale distributors of natural, organic, and conventional groceries in North America. For consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands, partnering with UNFI opens access to tens of thousands of retail outlets. In fact, UNFI distributes a vast array of products to thousands of retailers ranging from small independent health food stores and supermarket chains to e-commerce stores. This extensive network (over 30,000+ retail locations) makes UNFI a critical route-to-market for growing brands. However, navigating UNFI’s supplier platform can be complex without the right tools and understanding of their latest programs. This article provides an overview of the UNFI supplier platform – from the core myUNFI portal and data analytics tools to the relatively Simplified Supplier Approach (SSA) program – and highlights how CPG business owners can take advantage of these resources..
UNFI’s Role and Why It Matters
UNFI’s scale and reach mean that getting your products into their system can dramatically increase market exposure. The distributor works with over 11,000 suppliers and carries 250,000+ SKUs, connecting brands with a diverse and widespread base. As a supplier, this scale also brings operational considerations: UNFI’s business was built through acquisitions, resulting in East and West divisions that historically operated on separate systems. (For example, payments and deductions might be processed separately by region.) UNFI has been working to harmonize these processes and provide a more unified experience for suppliers. Understanding UNFI’s platform and programs is vital for CPG brands to grow profitably with this distributor. The good news is UNFI offers various digital tools and support services to help suppliers manage their partnership – if you know where to find them.
The myUNFI Supplier Portal
At the heart of UNFI’s online supplier experience is the myUNFI portal (accessed via suppliers.unfi.com). This is the main online gateway where suppliers can manage day-to-day business with UNFI. Through the portal, you can:
Manage Product Catalog and Listings: Ensure your item data (descriptions, pricing, case pack, etc.) is up to date for UNFI’s ordering system. UNFI encourages suppliers to use the GS1 Global Data Synchronization Network (GDSN) to publish accurate product information and images, which helps streamline item setup across UNFI’s systems. By synchronizing your product data via GDSN, you can update details for all partners (UNFI included) in one go, reducing errors and delays.
Review Purchase Orders and Fulfillments: Suppliers can receive purchase orders and confirm shipments through the portal. Many larger suppliers integrate via EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) for automated order and invoice exchange, which UNFI supports. (UNFI accepts invoices via EDI or email, though EDI is generally preferred to minimize errors and speed up payment processing.) Even if using EDI, the portal provides a visual confirmation of orders and their status.
Invoice and Payment Information: The portal allows you to view posted invoices, track payments, and see any deductions taken. This visibility is crucial for cash flow management. For example, you can quickly check if an invoice was short-paid due to a deduction or early payment discount. Historically, suppliers had to reconcile paper remittances or contact accounting – now much of that data is available in myUNFI.
Self-Service Support: myUNFI links out to various support resources. Suppliers can find forms (like deduction dispute forms), submit inquiries to UNFI departments, or access reference documents (fee schedules, policies) through the UNFI Supplier Support Center. Essentially, the portal acts as a one-stop hub for interacting with UNFI’s systems and teams.
UNFI Insights™ Data Dashboard
One of the most powerful tools now available through the supplier portal is the UNFI Insights analytics dashboard. Launched in 2023 and powered by a data platform provider (Crisp), UNFI Insights gives brands unprecedented access to their product performance data across UNFI’s entire network. This open data platform provides suppliers with comprehensive sales, inventory, and deduction data spanning both the natural (west) and conventional (east) distribution channels. In practical terms, UNFI Insights lets you monitor how your products are selling through UNFI, where your inventory is, and what deductions are hitting your account – all in near-real-time, via an intuitive online dashboard.
Key features of the UNFI Insights dashboard include:
Sales Trends and Velocity: You get a “Monday morning snapshot” of sales, highlighting which products are moving and which are lagging. The tool offers granular filtering by product, region, and even retailer or store type, so you can identify trends (e.g. a flavor selling exceptionally well in the Northeast) and adjust your strategy (like boosting promotions on slower sellers). Having this sell-through data readily available helps in making informed production and marketing decisions each week.
Inventory and Forecasting Data: UNFI Insights shows your inventory levels by distribution center, including metrics like weeks of supply on hand and products nearing expiration. This is critical for minimizing spoilage and out-of-stocks. For instance, if an item is close to its expiration date at a UNFI warehouse, you might coordinate a promotion or ask UNFI to return the product instead of letting it go unsold. By catching these situations early through the dashboard, suppliers can reduce waste and ensure fresher product flows to stores.
Category Benchmarking: A unique benefit of UNFI Insights is access to anonymized category-level data. You can see how your brand is performing relative to broader category trends within UNFI. This might reveal, for example, that your category (say organic snacks) is growing overall, even if your brand’s sales are flat – indicating an opportunity to capture more market share. UNFI provides this aggregated data in a way that protects individual competitors’ identities while still giving you actionable insight into category demand. This kind of market intelligence used to be very hard for small brands to obtain.
Deduction and Financial Insights: The platform consolidates deduction data as well, so you can track the types and amounts of deductions UNFI has taken out of your payments. Rather than sorting through remittance paperwork, suppliers can quickly identify if, for example, a spike in “damage allowances” occurred last month. While we’ll explore deductions in detail in a separate article, having this transparency in the dashboard means fewer surprises – you can catch issues (like unexpected chargebacks) faster and take action.
All of this data is delivered through a user-friendly interface. Both small businesses and big CPG suppliers find it useful: smaller brands can rely on the built-in visual reports (saving them from having to build their own spreadsheets), while larger suppliers can even integrate the raw data into their own systems. As of late 2024, nearly 4,000 suppliers were already using UNFI Insights regularly, and UNFI has been pushing to onboard the rest with training and support. In short, UNFI Insights transforms what used to be an opaque part of doing business with UNFI into a set of accessible, actionable metrics.
The Simplified Supplier Approach (SSA) Program
To unlock the full capabilities of the UNFI Insights dashboard and streamline the cost structure for brands, UNFI introduced the Simplified Supplier Approach (SSA) in 2024. SSA is essentially a new financial program that consolidates many supplier fees into a single flat rate, in exchange for enhanced data access and support. Under SSA, a supplier pays a 2.5% fee on their UNFI purchase volume (i.e. 2.5% of the cost of goods sold through UNFI). This percentage is deducted as a program fee, but enrolling in SSA comes with several notable benefits:
Elimination of Certain A la Carte Fees: Historically, UNFI charged various fees to suppliers for specific services or infractions. The SSA policy waives many of these charges. For example, new item slotting or activation fees (one-time charges to set up a product in a warehouse), compliance violation fees (fines for issues like incorrect labeling or late deliveries), distribution center efficiency (DCE) fees (a new per-case charge that penalizes slow-selling items in a warehouse), and ReposiTrak fees (for product traceability and safety compliance) are all waived for brands under SSA. This can represent significant savings, especially for emerging brands that would otherwise incur several of these costs while growing their distribution. (Notably, even under SSA, if you do have a compliance issue, UNFI gives you a 90-day window to fix it before any fee would be applied – encouraging proactive improvement.)
Simplified Billing and Predictability: Instead of juggling a “confusing range of fees” that appear as various deductions on invoices, SSA rolls most of it into one predictable percentage. This simplification helps with budgeting – you know that aside from normal trade discounts and any true shipping claims, you’ll just be paying the 2.5% program fee. For many suppliers, especially smaller ones, this clarity is welcome. It turns unpredictable chargebacks into a more straightforward cost of doing business with UNFI.
It’s worth noting that SSA is optional – suppliers have the choice to opt in or not. Those who opt out can continue to avoid the 2.5% fee, but they will continue to be subject to the individual fees (like DCE surcharges and others) as applicable. In essence, UNFI has structured SSA to be a trade-off: pay a bit more in margin, but get peace of mind and data benefits. Brands should evaluate this decision on an individual basis. The 2.5% fee can impact margins significantly, so larger suppliers with robust internal analytics might be more hesitant to join. On the other hand, many young brands might find SSA attractive because it removes barriers to entry (e.g. waiving hefty warehouse slotting fees for new products). If the insights help drive more sales, or prevent costly out-of-stocks and markdowns, SSA can potentially pay for itself. Each CPG supplier will need to weigh the costs and benefits based on their scale and needs. The introduction of SSA underscores a balancing act that UNFI hopes to offload on suppliers, but with proper decision making brands might even see benefits.
Other Key Supplier Tools and Resources
Beyond the portal and SSA program, UNFI suppliers should be aware of a few additional tools and resources that can make life easier:
UNFI Supplier Support Center: This is an online helpdesk (hosted on Zendesk) with a knowledge base of articles and forms. Here you can find official documents like the “Supplier Deduction Key” (a reference list explaining UNFI’s deduction reason codes), the Natural Deductions Dispute Form, marketing program guides, and contact directories for various departments. The Support Center is searchable and is a reasonable stop to answer many common questions. For example, if you need to dispute a charge or request backup documentation for a deduction, the instructions and required forms are available on this site. Utilizing these resources can save you from having to call or email back-and-forth for basic issues. A word-of caution to the belief that you’ll find all your answers here, and you might walk away with more questions than you started.
EDI and System Integrations: As mentioned, UNFI supports some integrations for order management, which can help streamline operations as your volume grows. In addition to EDI for orders/invoices, UNFI provides data integration for larger suppliers using the Insights platform (so you can pull data into tools like Excel or your own business intelligence software). Technical onboarding for these integrations is available through UNFI’s EDI support team.
New Supplier Onboarding and UpNext Program: If you are new to UNFI, be sure to follow their onboarding steps closely. This includes submitting a New Supplier Inquiry Form to introduce your product line, meeting insurance and food safety requirements, and understanding their logistics guidelines (case pack standards, pallet configurations, etc.). UNFI’s UpNext program is an initiative geared toward emerging brands – it provides additional guidance and exposure opportunities (like being featured in UNFI’s trade shows or promotions) to help new suppliers succeed. While not a “tool” in the software sense, UpNext is a resource that new CPG brands can try to capitalize on to accelerate growth within UNFI.
UNFI Marketing and Insights Programs: As a supplier, you’ll also encounter various marketing and promotional programs offered by UNFI (e.g. periodic discount promotions, advertisements in UNFI catalogs, the UNFI Media Network for digital marketing to retailers, etc.). Through the supplier portal or your UNFI Supplier Manager, you can learn about these opportunities. Many of these programs involve additional costs or allowances (often deducted from payments), so it’s important to understand them beforehand. When used wisely, they can increase your brand’s visibility to retailers in the network. The key is to treat these as investments and track their impact on sales.
Conclusion
UNFI’s supplier platform is much more than just a portal to receive POs. It’s an entire ecosystem meant to help brands integrate into a vast distribution network and grow their business. By taking advantage of the myUNFI portal, suppliers can better stay on top of orders and account information. The new UNFI Insights dashboard empowers even small brands with data analytics that were once reserved for big companies, helping to drive smarter decisions around production, marketing, and inventory management. Meanwhile, UNFI’s support resources and programs like UpNext ensure that suppliers aren’t left to figure things out alone. As a CPG business owner working with UNFI, it pays to regularly log in, explore these tools, and engage with the data and support at your fingertips. In doing so, you’ll build a stronger partnership with UNFI, reduce surprises (like unexpected fees or out-of-stock issues), and ultimately keep your products flowing profitably into the marketplace.
Sources:
UNFI Trading Partner Page – 1WorldSync: “UNFI is the premier food distributor in North America... We distribute a vast array of products to thousands of retailers...”
UNFI Newsroom – “UNFI Insights Powered by Crisp Empowers Suppliers to Make Better Data-Driven Decisions” (Dec 3, 2024).
George Milton, “UNFI SSA Ins and Outs for Brands” – Medium.com (Apr 27, 2024).
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