New Barn Organics is bringing buckwheat milk to Whole Foods Market shoppers across five regions — Southern Pacific, Northern California, Southwest, Rocky Mountain, and Florida — after acquiring the recipes and ingredient platform from BAM the Brand, Inc., the startup behind America's first commercially marketed buckwheat-based plant milk. The move represents New Barn's first SKU built from the ground up as Regenerative Organic Certified® (ROC™) and signals a deliberate push into a regenerative-agriculture positioning that goes beyond the legacy organic label.
The Supply Chain Play
The commercial structure here is more than a co-brand. New Barn purchased BAM's Buckwheat Milk recipes and will reformulate the product using BAM's proprietary Organic Buckwheat Milk Powder — a shelf-stable ingredient format designed to simplify scaling across food and beverage applications. BAM, in turn, becomes a supplier and ingredient company rather than a finished-goods competitor, with New Barn as its first commercial customer. BAM will use the arrangement to expand its ROC-certified buckwheat supply chain and pitch the powder into additional categories. Jasen Ureña, Vice President of New Barn Organics, described BAM's innovation as "a powerful ingredient to build from," signaling that more buckwheat SKUs could follow under the New Barn portfolio.
The partnership traces back to Whole Foods Market's Local and Emerging Accelerator Program (LEAP), where BAM was selected as a participant and New Barn served as a mentor. That retailer-brokered relationship is now a structured supplier arrangement backed by the Regenerative Organic Alliance (ROA), the nonprofit that administers the ROC standard, which worked directly with both brands to develop and certify the supply chain.
Category Context
The plant-based milk segment has faced sustained volume pressure over the past two years as the broader alternative-dairy category resets after pandemic-era growth. Oat milk retains category leadership on foodservice menus and retail shelves, but differentiation on sustainability credentials and agricultural story has become a competitive lever for emerging brands targeting natural and specialty channels. Buckwheat's agronomic profile — it suppresses weeds without herbicides, attracts pollinators, and rebuilds soil organic matter — gives suppliers a regenerative narrative that oat and almond cannot easily replicate at scale. For operators and retail buyers sourcing for natural-channel planograms, a gluten-free, Certified Seed Oil Free, ROC-certified milk SKU addresses several on-trend attribute checkboxes simultaneously.
New Barn's distribution footprint already spans natural, specialty, and mainstream channels nationally, which gives the buckwheat milk immediate shelf access that a startup like BAM could not achieve independently. Whole Foods Market Emerging Brands Forager Lisa Tosun noted that the LEAP program specifically looks for supplier partnerships of this type, calling the outcome "an extra win" for the retailer.
What Operators Should Watch
For foodservice buyers and plant-based beverage category managers, the BAM-New Barn deal illustrates a broader consolidation pattern in the emerging-ingredient space: undercapitalized innovators licensing or selling their IP to established distributors with the retail relationships and regulatory infrastructure to scale. The shelf-stable powder format BAM developed is particularly relevant for foodservice and hospitality applications — barista programs, culinary R&D, and institutional foodservice — where liquid plant milks carry cold-chain cost burdens. Whether New Barn pursues a foodservice-specific SKU or bulk powder offering has not been disclosed, but the ingredient platform makes that pathway viable.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
