Efficient Grocery Trading - National Food Exchange

The National Food Exchange was developed to create an efficient marketplace for the historically inefficient grocery trading industry. Thousands of “offers of availability” are listed on the exchange and user can both buy and offer product directly on the exchange one approved. The home page offers a few examples and the format of the exchange but does not include most of the interactive features like sort by manufacturer, look for by UPC and find an item using the word search and sort by percentage savings to name a few. To view the entire exchange the user needs to click on ‘register’ and fill out a very basic one page form. To protect the integrity of the exchange, National Food Exchange will contact users and qualify them as an active or potentially active trader. On the registration form the user will make up his/her password and after approval they will be able to sign on using email address as username and their password.

Although the wholesale grocery trading business has been around since the 1960’s it has been characterized largely by fragmented information transmitted first by telephone, then by fax and recently by email. Traders aggressively call buyers on the telephone with “hot offers” which may or may not interrupt their buyers at any given time. The fax and email largely negate this disruption but still only afford the opportunity to convey a small number of offers to a buyer in static format that the seller chooses to offer. None of these methods are as efficient as the National Food Exchange.

The National Food Exchange http://www.nationalfoodexchange.com/aboutus.asp allows buyers to review an entire database of available items (normally several thousand) at any given time and, more importantly, to interactively sort and search for specific items or lines they know are of interest to them rather than only what a seller choose to offer. The National Food Exchange standardizes and organizes information for the grocery trading industry. The exchange is actually made up up two databases- The “exchange” database and the “inventory” database.