KeHE Connect: The Distributor Portal for Natural and Specialty Brands

KeHE Connect is the supplier portal that KeHE, one of the two big natural and specialty food distributors in the US, hands to the brands it carries. If you sell through KeHE, KeHE Connect is your window into how product moves through the distributor and out to the retailers behind it. The thing to keep straight from the start: this is distributor data, and distributor data does not behave the way retailer data does.

What KeHE Connect shows you

KeHE Connect is built around the distributor relationship, so it reports the things you need to manage that relationship. Four areas cover most of it.

• Movement: units and dollars shipped from KeHE to its retail customers, which is about as close to sell-through as this channel gets you.
• Ordering and inventory: what KeHE is holding, what it has on order, and where a SKU is at risk of running short at a distribution center.
• Authorizations and item setup: which retailers have cleared which items, plus the new-item and promotional submission workflows you run through the portal.
• Deals: the distributor deal calendar, with the manufacturer-chargeback detail behind it.

Distributor data is not retailer data

This is the part people get wrong, so it is worth slowing down on. KeHE sits between you and the retailer. KeHE Connect reports shipments out of the distributor. It does not report scans at the store, and that distinction changes how you should read every number in it.

• It shows sell-in to retailers, not sell-through to shoppers. A case that ships from a KeHE distribution center to a store counts as movement even if it is still sitting in the store's back room.
• It only sees the KeHE channel. If you also sell through UNFI or direct, none of that business shows up here.
• It carries the distributor's own calendar and item codes, which will not line up with a retailer portal or a syndicated panel until someone maps them.

So KeHE Connect is essential for running the KeHE business and incomplete as a read on real demand. Pair it with retailer POS anywhere you can get your hands on it.

Getting something useful out of it

A few habits separate brands that use the portal from brands that just open it.

• Watch authorizations as closely as you watch movement, because a SKU shedding retailer authorizations is a warning a movement report will only confirm for you a quarter later.
• Reconcile the deal and chargeback detail against what you planned to spend, since distributor promotions are a reliable source of trade-spend surprises.
• Export the movement data so the KeHE channel sits in the same view as the rest of your accounts instead of off in its own portal.

Brands that read KeHE well treat the portal as the system of record for the KeHE relationship, and they never confuse distributor movement with the whole demand picture.

KeHE Connect is one feed among many. For how distributor data fits with retailer portals, POS, and syndicated panels, see What is retailer data?.