What A Buyer Checks Before They Say Yes
A wholesale account is rarely lost on the product. It is lost on the paperwork, the pack size, the terms, or a question about capacity that nobody had answered.
- Five hard blockers, checked before anything else, because a missing one means no order however good the rest looks
- "Not sure" is a real answer and produces its own list of things to go and confirm
- Grouped the way a buyer thinks: price, supply, paperwork, collateral, terms
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Five Of The Fifteen Are Pass Or Fail
Most scorecards average everything into a percentage. That is exactly wrong here, because a buyer does not average. If one of these is missing, the order does not happen regardless of how strong everything else is.
Blocker
Your fully loaded cost per unit
Not an estimate. You cannot set a wholesale price without it, and the buyer will test it.
Blocker
Capacity for a repeat order
Every cycle, not one heroic run, and without dropping your other channels.
Blocker
Product liability insurance
Buyers commonly require this before an order is placed, and the amount varies by buyer.
Blocker
Compliant labeling
Ingredients, allergens, net weight and the responsible party, for where you intend to sell.
Blocker
A UPC or GTIN per item
Required for retail scanning. Foodservice and some distributors may not need one, so check with your buyer.
93% is not a pass. That is the whole reason the blockers are checked before the score. A tool that averaged a missing insurance policy into a healthy percentage would send you into a buyer meeting confident, which is worse than telling you nothing.
Five Groups, In The Order A Buyer Works Through Them
Three questions each, except terms, which gets two, and paperwork, which gets four because that is where most deals stall.
01
Price and cost
Whether you know your loaded cost, have a wholesale price separate from retail, and still make money at it after freight and allowances.
02
Supply and capacity
Repeat volume, batch-to-batch consistency, and what happens when a crop fails or equipment breaks.
03
Paperwork
Insurance, labeling, a written food safety plan, and whether you could trace one unit back to a batch and a date.
04
What you hand over
A spec sheet a buyer can act on, packaging that survives a category review, and a UPC per item.
05
Terms and logistics
Whether you can afford Net 30 to Net 60, and who pays freight. This is where deals get agreed and then quietly hurt.
Out
A verdict, not a percentage
Blockers outstanding, things to go and confirm, and one of four positions: not ready, find out first, nearly, or ready to pitch.
Useful if
- You are about to pitch a retailer, distributor or foodservice buyer
- A buyer has approached you and you are not sure what they will ask for
- You sell direct and are working out whether wholesale is worth it
- You got a maybe last time and never found out why
- You are building toward wholesale over the next year and want the list now
Probably not, if
- You want legal or regulatory advice. This is neither, and the specifics need a qualified advisor
- You already supply national retail, in which case you know all fifteen
- You are looking for buyer introductions. This tells you whether you are ready, not who to call
1,000+retail stores in Painterland's first year
A client this applies to
“We would simply not be where we are today if it weren’t for the supportive team at Good Roots.”
– Stephanie Painter, Painterland Sisters
Before the brand and the press campaign came the unglamorous work: cost per unit, margin by channel, and packaging built to survive a category review. Retailers stopped seeing a startup and started seeing a brand ready to scale, which is a different conversation entirely. By mid-2025 they supplied more than five thousand stores.
Read what happened