UNFI expands RangeMe partnership

United Natural Foods Inc. (UNFI) has upped its relationship with RangeMe to facilitate purchase orders directly on UNFI’s Easy Options platform through RangeMe. The companies have been working together for the last four years.

UNFI’s Easy Options platform serves small-to-medium-sized businesses with flexible order sizes and no frequency requirements, providing RangeMe suppliers with an additional outlet to promote their products to retail buyers.

Tom Kraus, vice president of e-commerce at UNFI, told Store Brands that some of the suppliers the wholesaler works with via RangeMe could be exclusive to UNFI as a wholesaler, but the company’s arrangement with RangeMe is more about getting its brands and retailers to be able to easily connect through UNFI.

“In short, through RangeMe and UNFI we are helping smaller brands find customers and facilitate their growth,” he said.

Using RangeMe, UNFI suppliers will set up a profile on RangeMe to increase their brand and product visibility to a wider audience of retail buyers. “Scale and access to the widest assortment of products are the foundation for being able to best serve customers in today’s e-commerce world,” said Kraus said. “Through RangeMe, we’ve now set up an expanded universe of discovery where our current and future customers are able to more easily purchase products that their customers demand through Easy Options.”

Integrated into the ECRM product offering, RangeMe offers an online platform that streamlines new product discovery between more than 200,000 suppliers and retailers.

“This is the latest evolution of our relationship with UNFI, and it’s focused on facilitating the prevailing way that retailers and suppliers want to do business,” noted Nicky Jackson, founder and CEO of RangeMe, an ECRM company based in San Francisco. “RangeMe empowers nearly 13,000 retail buyers to efficiently discover innovative and emerging products and we’re excited to expand our work with UNFI to bring tremendous opportunity to a broader set of suppliers and retailers across the industry.”

Providence, R.I.-based UNFI delivers a wide variety of products to customer locations throughout North America, including natural product superstores, independent retailers, conventional supermarket chains, e-commerce retailers and foodservice customers.