Distributor Portals: UNFI, C&S & KeHE Guide

If you sell food or beverage through a distributor, you will spend part of every week inside distributor portals. These are the supplier-facing websites that UNFI, C&S, and KeHE give the brands they carry, and they are where you read movement, manage inventory, set up new items, and reconcile deductions. Each portal covers one distributor and one channel, so a brand carried by all three logs into three different systems to assemble one picture. This guide covers the three you are most likely to use, what data each exposes, and how brands get the exports out of the portal and into something they can actually read together.

One distinction is worth nailing down before the tour: a distributor portal reports shipments out of the distributor, not scans at the store. That is the single most common misread, and it shapes how you should treat every number these systems show you. More on that below.

myUNFI: the UNFI supplier portal

myUNFI (often written my unfi) is the supplier portal for UNFI, the largest natural, organic, and specialty distributor in North America and the distributor behind a huge share of natural-channel retail. If you sell through UNFI, myUNFI is where you manage that relationship day to day. It is for the brand's sales, supply, and category teams, plus whoever owns the UNFI account.

What a supplier can pull from myUNFI:

• Movement: units and cases shipped from UNFI distribution centers out to retail customers, by item and by period. This is the closest thing the channel gives you to sell-through.
• Inventory and ordering: what UNFI is holding, what is on order, and where a SKU is at risk of running short at a distribution center.
• Deductions and chargebacks: the deal and chargeback detail behind promotions, which is where most trade-spend surprises start.
• New-item and authorization workflows: the item-setup and submission steps you run through the portal, plus which retailers have cleared which items.

How brands typically work with it: suppliers request access through their UNFI distributor contact, then use the portal as the system of record for the UNFI relationship. Sales teams watch movement and authorizations; finance reconciles the deduction detail against what they planned to spend. The data lives in UNFI's own item codes and calendar, so almost everyone exports it rather than reading it report by report inside the portal.

The C&S Wholesale Grocers supplier portal

C&S Wholesale Grocers is one of the largest grocery wholesalers in the US, supplying conventional supermarkets, independents, and military commissaries. Its supplier-facing tools, what brands usually mean by the c&s portal, serve the same purpose as the others: they let a vendor manage the C&S relationship, handle orders and logistics, and read movement through the C&S network.

C&S skews more conventional-grocery than UNFI or KeHE, so the brands living in this portal are often selling into mainstream supermarket banners rather than natural-channel stores. The data a supplier can pull is again built around the distributor relationship:

• Movement and shipments: cases moving from C&S warehouses to the retail banners it serves, by item and period.
• Inventory and orders: warehouse on-hand, open orders, and supply signals that flag a SKU running thin.
• Deductions and billing detail: the chargeback and deal records you reconcile against planned trade spend.
• Item setup and logistics: new-item submission and the shipping and routing detail that keeps product flowing to the warehouse.

How brands typically work with it: as with the others, suppliers request access through their C&S contact. Because C&S is heavily a logistics and order operation, brands often treat the portal first as an operations tool (orders, routing, fill) and second as a movement read. The cleanest pattern is to export the movement and deduction data on a schedule so the C&S channel sits next to every other account instead of staying locked in its own login.

KeHE CONNECT: the specialty distributor portal

KeHE CONNECT (the kehe connect portal) is the supplier portal for KeHE, the other big natural and specialty distributor alongside UNFI. If you sell natural, organic, or specialty product, there is a strong chance you are carried by KeHE, UNFI, or both, and running each one's portal in parallel. For a fuller walk-through of this one, see KeHE Connect: the specialty distributor portal.

What a supplier can pull from KeHE CONNECT:

• Movement: units and dollars shipped from KeHE to its retail customers, the channel's stand-in for sell-through.
• Ordering and inventory: what KeHE is holding, what it has on order, and where a SKU is at risk at a distribution center.
• Authorizations and item setup: which retailers have cleared which items, plus the new-item and promotional submission workflows.
• Deals and chargebacks: the distributor deal calendar with the manufacturer-chargeback detail behind it.

How brands typically work with it: suppliers request access through their KeHE contact and treat the portal as the system of record for the KeHE relationship. The habit that separates brands who use the portal from brands who just open it is watching authorizations as closely as movement, because a SKU shedding retailer authorizations is an early warning that a movement report will only confirm a quarter later.

What these distributor portals give a brand, and what they leave out

The three portals look different, but they expose roughly the same shape of data, because they answer the same question: how is product moving through this distributor and out to its retailers. Here is how they line up.

The shared blind spot matters as much as the shared coverage. Every one of these portals reports sell-in to retailers, not sell-through to shoppers. A case that ships from a distribution center to a store counts as movement even while it sits in the store's back room. None of them sees the store scan, the shopper, or the category around your product, and each sees only its own channel. A brand selling through UNFI, C&S, and KeHE has three partial views, and no single one of them is the demand picture.

That is why distributor portals pair with, rather than replace, retailer first-party data and syndicated panels. Retailer portals like Walmart's show store-level scans (see Retail Link data: what Walmart's portal shows), and syndicated data sees the whole category. Distributor data tells you what you shipped; those other feeds tell you what actually sold and how the category moved around it.

Getting the data out into analytics

The practical problem with distributor portals is not access, it is fragmentation. Each portal carries its own item codes, its own calendar, and its own deduction format, and none of them line up until someone maps them. A brand on three distributors plus a couple of retailer portals can have an analyst spending most of a week just pulling and reconciling exports, with no time left for the actual reading.

A few habits keep it manageable:

• Pull on a fixed schedule. Decide the handful of questions that matter (movement by item, in-stock risk, deduction reconciliation) and export only those, on a set cadence, instead of pulling everything ad hoc.
• Map onto a shared product master. To stack UNFI against C&S against KeHE, you have to translate each portal's item codes and week definitions onto one common set so a SKU is the same SKU everywhere.
• Reconcile deductions against plan. Distributor deals are a reliable source of trade-spend surprises, so check the chargeback detail against what you intended to spend. The gap between the two is your real distributor margin exposure.
• Treat the portal as a feed, not a destination. Export the data so every channel sits in one view rather than living behind a separate distributor portal login.

Some brands wire the exports into a spreadsheet stack; others move the harmonizing step into a tool built for it. Scout is one such surface: it takes the myUNFI, C&S, and KeHE CONNECT exports, maps them onto a shared product master, and puts every distributor channel in one place next to retailer POS and syndicated data, so the reading happens against the whole picture instead of one portal at a time.

Distributor portals are essential for running each distributor relationship and incomplete as a read on real demand. The brands that get the most out of them treat each portal as the system of record for its own channel, export the movement and deduction data on a schedule, and do the actual analysis somewhere all the channels can sit side by side.