This year, we’ve decided to make what many might consider an unexpected pivot—Big Spoon Roasters is ending our 10+ year relationship with Whole Foods Market, the distributor UNFI, and other national grocery chains to focus exclusively on partnerships with independent retailers and smaller regional grocers, as well as direct customer relationships through our online store.
We’ll always be grateful for the consistent growth and support we’ve experienced at Whole Foods Market and other retailers that make up the national grocery distribution system, but the system itself is unfortunately not set up to support small-batch, values-driven independent businesses like ours.
This decision will allow us to continue growing the business in a way that aligns with our values while redirecting valuable staff and company resources toward relationships with end consumers and the smaller, regional, and independent retailers that have always made up the foundation of our retail partner community.
We’ll likely fill the last POs to UNFI in April 2025, and our products should be off the shelves of Whole Foods by the end of May (some locations might take longer). For those who normally purchase our products at Whole Foods Market, please consider ordering directly on our website bigspoonroasters.com. Also, please reach out via info@bigspoonroasters.com, and we’ll let you know about other retail options near you. If there are independent retailers in your community we should be working with, please share their information and we’ll get in touch with them!
We also want to express gratitude for the wonderful people we have worked with and gotten to know at both Whole Foods Market and UNFI over the years. These organizations employ many hardworking people fighting the good fight for more quality, transparency, and sustainability in our food system. There are too many people to name, but we’d love to shout out Debbie Marsh and Amy Mescal at Whole Foods Market, as well as Letha George and Eric Riddle at UNFI, for their help making this transition as smooth as possible. 
Background & Values
Inspired in part by an experience making peanut butter by hand over an open fire during my Peace Corps service in Zimbabwe, Big Spoon Roasters began with the simple idea that food can be delicious, nutritious, and good for both people and the planet. Fifteen years later, Megan and I continue to build a business around these values, one small batch at a time.
We are immensely grateful for the following our products have earned and the growth we’ve been able to achieve. Milestones have included prestigious national press, a presence in many of the country’s best retailers, shelf space in national grocers, and mail order distribution to every corner of the globe. We’re truly humbled and honored to do this work, and it brings us so much joy to share the foods we make.
Our hope has always been that through pure, delicious food experiences, we could nudge the communities we touch toward a more sustainable future. When we worked with our Team Members to create a set of Big Spoon Team Values, #1 on that list was CRAFT MATTERS. This means that the craft of making the best possible food—achieving the highest quality—is never compromised. We’ve remained independent, without outside investors, in part to make sure this priority around values-driven craft is never threatened. In a high-speed age getting faster by the minute, Big Spoon Roasters will always provide slow food, made well. 
Grocery Dreams vs. Reality
Like most small food businesses, we had always dreamed of seeing our products reach a wider audience, and grocery stores seemed like the perfect platform. I’ll never forget the feeling of seeing Big Spoon Roasters jars on the shelves of our local Durham, NC, Whole Foods Market for the first time. We then grew into the Chapel Hill, Raleigh, Greensboro, and Asheville stores. We were still hand filling every jar with a spoon, and I made all the deliveries myself and scheduled demos on evenings and weekends. As our partnership with Whole Foods grew throughout the region and nation, it felt like validation; customers across 30 states could find Big Spoon Roasters in the aisles along with legendary makers such as Bob’s Red Mill, Tom’s of Maine, and Clif.
However, once we reached multi-region “Global” distribution, we quickly realized that the large-scale (national) grocery system was not designed to celebrate or nurture the maker. Rather, the system moves producers into a position of higher volumes and lower margins.
The large-scale grocery model also requires makers to give up control of pricing on the shelf, which for us has led to significant pricing discrepancies between SRPs, independent retailers, and grocery stores. Customers expect fair and consistent treatment, and that’s what we aim to provide, but the price discrepancies led to consumer confusion and eroded trust in our brand. Pricing teams, now often AI-driven, operate separately from buying teams and set prices to meet their needs, not the needs of makers who depend on consistent pricing across all retail environments.
In addition, tremendous staff resources have been required to dispute erroneous UNFI chargebacks. We’ve won 100% of our claims, but the strain on our business in managing the dispute process is unsustainable. The distribution system has also struggled to forecast demand accurately, leading to empty shelves and frustrated customers. 
Our Craft, Our Path
Last year, we were in an impromptu meeting discussing the latest compound of frustrations regarding invalid chargeback fees, grocery pricing discrepancies, and the latest customer complaint email asking why our products are out of stock again at a Whole Foods location. We stopped, took a breath, and realized that the underlying causes of these issues were systemic and part of a path we no longer wanted to travel.
Even so, the decision to leave the national grocery distribution system hasn't been easy. It requires giving up a large percentage of our revenue and restructuring operations. 2025 might be the first year our total revenue hasn’t grown, ever.
However, the decision also entails some changes we are incredibly excited about, namely the ability to redirect resources toward deepening relationships with end consumers and the smaller, regional, and independent retailers that have always made up the backbone of our retail partner community. Look for even more innovation, storytelling, and ways to make Big Spoon a part of your life.
We view this strategic decision as an important step forward and a recentering around our founding values. In our definition of success, growth isn’t always about getting bigger but about staying true. We don’t regret our time or investment in national grocery relationships, because we learned so much from the experience, but this is the right decision for Big Spoon Roasters, our team, our customers, and our network of supplier and retail partners.
First portrait by Forrest Mason.