Wholesale

This is the least developed part of vendo, and we would rather say so plainly than dress it up. The taxonomy draft that seeded this whole hub calls bulk/wholesale/B2B “the most speculative category” of the four it proposes, and flags it as checked against essentially zero real cases. The one case study vendo has run so far shows a vendor buying wholesale goods, not selling them. Everything on this page is a question mark we are carrying forward on purpose, not an answer.

Source: vendo/taxonomy/vendor-types-draft.md §2.4 and §6. Nothing here is a schema, a field name, or a decision.

What this category would even mean

Vendor-to-vendor, vendor-to-business

The taxonomy draft's working definition is a transaction shape, not a product category: one vendor or business selling to another vendor or business, in bulk, rather than to an individual walk-up customer. Not consumer-facing.

Draft's own examples: a tortillería selling cases to a restaurant, or a produce vendor supplying other street vendors.

How it differs from the other three

Retail/street, catering/private-event, and food truck services are all, in the end, someone selling food to a person who is going to eat it. Wholesale/B2B is different in kind: the buyer is another business, buying to resell, cook with, or restock, not to eat on the spot. That is the actual distinction the draft is trying to name, separate from any question of scale.

What we actually know

Known, from n=1

Almost nothing here is grounded yet. The one case study vendo has (a cost-and-sourcing analysis for an elotero cart) documents the supply side of this shape from the buyer's perspective: the elotero himself sources ingredients from wholesalers, including produce terminals, Restaurant Depot, and MexMax. That is real, but it makes him a bulk buyer, not a bulk seller. It is adjacent to this category, not an example of it.

The one thing the draft says can be stated with any confidence: this category is explicitly not consumer-facing, so the platform doctrine built for consumer-facing surfaces (no star ratings, community tags, interlink as gameplay) does not obviously apply here as written. But nothing has tested that assumption against a real case either. It is a guess about what would probably be true, not a finding.

SOURCING NOTE Restaurant Depot and MexMax are named above only as a source in one research report about how a cart-style vendor buys. This is not a recommendation, and vendo has no affiliation with either business, or with any wholesaler, market, vendor, or other business named on this site.

Open questions, carried forward honestly

Directly from the taxonomy draft's §2.4 and §6. These are not rhetorical. Nobody has answered them yet, and the draft is explicit that they should be answered by real cases, not by more desk reasoning.

Is this even in scope?

Vendo's stated mission is information access for people finding food to eat. Wholesale/B2B serves a different audience with a different need: other businesses, not eaters. It is not established that serving that audience is in scope for this hub at all.

What would a listing look like?

Every other category assumes a walk-up customer who might read a profile before showing up. A wholesale-only vendor has no walk-up customer to write copy for. What the “audience” even is, and what a listing would show them, is unanswered.

Do the sourcing tiers apply?

The platform's source-tier model for what can be published about a vendor is built around consumer-facing claims. Whether or how it applies to B2B claims, like a wholesale minimum order or case pricing, is untested.

Listed, onboarded, or neither?

Retail/street vendors get a self-managed profile with no certification required. Whether a wholesale-only vendor fits that same “listed” shape, or needs something else entirely because a wholesale relationship is more of an actual transaction than a walk-up sale, has no basis for an answer yet.

What still applies here, unresolved or not

wholesale-seller cases studied

Zero take, no middleman

Whatever shape this eventually takes, vendo does not take a cut of a wholesale relationship and does not become a party to it. Same hard constraint as every other category on this hub.

Not building ahead of the evidence

The taxonomy draft is explicit: this category should not gain more structure than what's above until a real B2B/wholesale case exists to test it against. That is the standard the rest of this page is trying to hold to.

The honest summary: this page exists to name a possible category, not to describe a working one. If you are a vendor who sells in bulk to other vendors or businesses and want to help ground this, the useful thing is a real case, not a finished listing. There isn't one to fill out yet.

See the full draft reasoning at /taxonomy/, or the other three vendor-type pages: /street/ and /catering/ are further along; food truck services is not yet its own page.