Etto Whole Foods Journey

The world of selling food to grocery is a lot more complicated than it seems and even more so these days. As a small food producer selling to Whole Foods is an important part of the journey to brand awareness and success. Hopefully it gets our product out there to a new audience and makes it easier for our pasta fans that aren't local to pick up a box or two or seven in a pinch. Heck, I even have a few friends that proudly claim to buy our pasta in the SLO Whole Foods. We started selling to Whole Foods a few years back when they actually reached out to us somehow and we were added to three stores. A year or so later they expanded us to eight stores and that was pretty exciting (I think the national count is around 500 stores).

This was good for a while, but on one of my trips to Southern California I noticed that none of the stores had any local or California made pasta. I reached out to my forager (this is what Whole Foods calls their local product buyers) and asked her if this was something we could help her change. After a lengthy submission and review process they decided to add us to another 20 plus locations bringing our total now to 32 stores.

One of the days, one of my daughters joined me to take some pictures, but then she had some friends to visit so I was on my own for the rest of the journey. I spoke to most of the grocery managers and store trainers and told them the story of Etto and gave them a sample to try with some highlight cards about Etto. Hopefully these efforts will pay off and you never know, there are still another 470 or so stores.

 

In addition to these two major markets, our pasta can also now be found in San Diego, Hawaii (maybe I need to make a visit here), Arizona and Nevada. Here's the list below so if you live or are traveling close to any of these stores you can now pick up some Etto - or visit all of them like me (maybe not). If your favorite store isn't on the list please tell them to order Etto.