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The Farmers Market Table That Became a Regional Wholesale Account

By Ingrid Sorensen, Specialty Food Producer — Madison, WI

I started selling at the Dane County Farmers Market in 2019 — small-batch preserves, pickles, and fermented foods under the name Northfield Provisions. My Saturday table was doing $1,100 to $1,400 depending on the season. I had regulars. I had a waiting list for my fermented hot sauce. I had a business card with a hand-drawn jar on it.

In March 2020, a specialty grocery buyer from a regional co-op chain stopped at my table. She bought two jars of my sauerkraut and a jar of my habanero honey. She handed me her card and said they were always looking for local producers. Their stores carried over 600 specialty food items. Their typical wholesale order was 24 units per SKU per location across 8 stores.

I did the math on the drive home. 24 units × 8 stores × 6 SKUs at my wholesale rate was roughly $6,048 per order. They reordered quarterly.

I had no wholesale pricing structure, no invoice template with a PO field, no way to track which stores had placed which orders, and no idea what a co-op wholesale agreement looked like. I had a spreadsheet and a prayer.

I called her the next day and said I was working on getting my wholesale materials together. I spent the next two weeks building the invoice structure before I replied.

The Invoice That Unlocked the Account

The co-op’s accounts payable ran on net-30 with PO numbers. They needed a formal invoice, not an email receipt. Their buyers needed to see product codes, unit prices, case quantities, and delivery terms.

Here’s what I built in InvoiceFlow:

Wholesale Order — Northfield Provisions — [Co-op Name] — [Date]:

Account Details:

Items:

Payment Terms: Net-30 Minimum order: 12 units per SKU per location Reorder cycle: Quarterly

They approved the first order inside a week. The PO came through on a Tuesday; I had $1,392 invoiced and delivery scheduled by Thursday.

Building the Full Wholesale Structure

Invoice Flow app invoice editor of an artisan food producer — hot honey, wildflower honey and preserves at wholesale unit pricing with a case discount and batch codes
Jars, cases, batch codes — a supplier invoice a grocery buyer can trace and file.

The co-op account forced me to build what I should have had from the beginning: a real wholesale pricing structure and a separate template for each account type.

My pricing tiers:

I built a separate InvoiceFlow template for each tier with the correct pricing pre-loaded. When a new specialty grocer called, I opened the retail wholesale template, filled in their account details, and the pricing was already right.

Farmers Market Invoices

Direct sales at the market were simple, but I started issuing receipts after a wholesale buyer at the table asked for documentation of their purchase.

Farmers Market Sale — Northfield Provisions — [Date]:

The batch code and production date turned out to matter: one of my co-op buyers used them to track shelf life and reduce spoilage in their inventory system. It made me look professional. It also saved me when a store once claimed they’d received product close to expiration — I could pull the invoice and show the production and delivery dates.

Restaurant and Food Service Accounts

Invoice Flow app recurring invoices of a food producer — a weekly café standing order and a monthly grocery restock
The café's weekly order and the grocery restock bill themselves on cycle.

Two farm-to-table restaurants in Madison started ordering after a chef found me at the market. Restaurant accounts are different from retail wholesale — they’re using my products in dishes, not reselling them. Smaller volumes, tighter margins on their end, and they want flexibility.

Food Service Order — [Restaurant Name] — [Date]:

Items:

Restaurant accounts pay faster than retail accounts because they order closer to their actual need. A grocery co-op plans quarters ahead; a restaurant calls when they’re running low. I keep restaurant terms at net-15 because the urgency of their ordering cycle means they actually pay promptly.

Subscription and CSA-Style Programs

After three years at the market, I had regulars who wanted guaranteed access to limited-batch products before they sold out. I built a monthly subscription program: subscribers paid for a curated monthly box and got first pick of limited batches.

Monthly Provisions Box — [Subscriber Name] — [Month Year]:

InvoiceFlow auto-generates and sends the subscription invoice on the 1st. By the time I’m packing boxes, the invoices have already gone out and most subscribers have paid via the payment link on the invoice. I’m not chasing payment on subscription orders.

Specialty Gift Orders

Invoice Flow app documents of a specialty food business — a grocery supplier order, an EUR export invoice, a paid corporate gift-hamper order and a paid café order
Grocery, export in euros, corporate hampers, café supply — the whole trade book on one screen.

Food gifts for the holidays, corporate wellness programs, and local company employee gifts became a steady Q4 revenue channel.

Specialty Food Gift Order — [Company or Client Name] — [Date]:

Corporate gift orders have long lead times — I need the deposit before I buy the specialty ingredients for large production runs. The 50% deposit rule came from one Q4 where I produced 80 gift sets for a company that had a reorganization and cancelled the order. I ate the ingredient cost. That never happened again.

The Shelf Life Note

Specialty food invoices need one thing that most other invoices don’t: shelf life documentation.

I add a standard note to every wholesale invoice:

“All products include best-by dates on packaging. Northfield Provisions guarantees product is delivered with a minimum of [N] weeks/months remaining shelf life. Batch production records available on request.”

This matters for retail buyers. A store receiving product with 2 weeks left on a 6-month shelf life will return it and dispute the invoice. The shelf life guarantee on the invoice is your documentation if there’s ever a dispute.

Four Years Later

I left the full-time software job in 2022.

Current monthly revenue breakdown:

The Saturday table is still there. I still do the market most weeks in season. But it’s a fraction of the business now, and it’s where buyers still find me.

Download InvoiceFlow. Build wholesale templates for each account tier with correct pricing and minimum orders. Add shelf life notes to every wholesale invoice. Set subscription auto-billing. Add deposit structure to gift orders. The co-op buyer who picks up your product at the market is the beginning of a wholesale account — if you have the invoice to back it up.

Ingrid Sorensen is the owner of Northfield Provisions in Madison, Wisconsin, producing small-batch fermented foods, preserves, and specialty condiments sold wholesale to regional co-ops, independent grocers, restaurants, and through direct market sales and subscription programs.