UNFI and KeHE have different insurance requirements than your retailers — and different from each other. Missing one field on the COI delays your onboarding by weeks. Here's the exact checklist for both distributors.
When brands land a natural channel retailer — a Whole Foods, a Sprouts, a Natural Grocers — they quickly learn that the retailer's insurance requirement is only part of the compliance picture. To actually get product on those shelves, it has to move through a distributor. UNFI and KeHE are the two dominant distributors in the natural and specialty channel, and they have their own insurance requirements that are separate from, and in some ways more detailed than, the retailers they service.
The logic is the same as with retailers: distributors handle your product in their warehouses, load it onto their trucks, and deliver it to retailers. Any incident that occurs in that chain — a warehouse accident, a contamination event traced back to your product, a delivery dispute — involves the distributor as a potential defendant. Their vendor compliance requirements are designed to ensure that every brand they carry has the coverage to backstop those potential claims.
The critical difference is that distributor requirements and retailer requirements don't always align. A brand can have a perfectly compliant COI for Whole Foods and still fail UNFI's onboarding because the certificate holder format is wrong, the waiver of subrogation language is missing, or the limits don't meet the distributor-specific threshold. Managing both compliance streams simultaneously is a real operational challenge for emerging brands, and it's one of the most common places where onboarding timelines slip by weeks.
The regional complexity compounds the issue. UNFI and KeHE each have multiple legal entities operating across different regions. The certificate holder for a UNFI Pacific Northwest order isn't necessarily the same as the certificate holder for a UNFI Southeast order. Brands that operate nationally — or that are launching in multiple regions simultaneously — need a broker who maintains current entity name information for all distributor regions, not just the one they happen to be onboarding into first.
UNFI (United Natural Foods, Inc.) requires a Certificate of Insurance that names "UNFI / United Natural Foods, Inc." as the certificate holder — using that specific format, not just "UNFI" alone. Their standard vendor requirement is $1M per occurrence / $2M aggregate for general liability, with products-completed operations coverage included within the GL form. Commercial auto liability is required if your brand uses its own vehicles for any delivery activity.
The additional insured endorsement for UNFI must be by name, not blanket. A blanket additional insured clause ("any person or organization required by contract") may or may not be enforceable in a specific UNFI claim scenario, and their vendor compliance team requires the specific endorsement to confirm AI status. The endorsement must be an actual endorsement attached to your policy — not just language typed into the certificate holder or description of operations field by your broker.
UNFI requires a waiver of subrogation on the general liability policy. As with retailer requirements, this must be a policy endorsement, not a certificate notation. UNFI's compliance team is trained to verify that the waiver is an actual policy provision, and they will reject COIs where the waiver is stated in the description of operations field without an attached endorsement form. Products recall coverage, if available on your policy, should be attached to the certificate — UNFI doesn't require it for all vendors, but having it attached strengthens your vendor compliance profile significantly.
KeHE's requirements are similar to UNFI's in structure but differ in specifics. KeHE operates through regional distribution centers, and the certificate holder entity name varies by region. KeHE Distributors, LLC is the primary national entity, but regional operations may have different legal names that must appear on the certificate. KeHE's vendor portal includes current certificate holder requirements by region — and that information changes when KeHE restructures regional entities, which it has done multiple times in the past decade.
KeHE's minimum GL limits are the same as UNFI's: $1M per occurrence / $2M aggregate. However, KeHE may require higher limits for certain product categories — refrigerated and fresh products, products with high allergen risk, and products in elevated liability categories (supplements, beverages) may face $2M per occurrence requirements. Understanding your product category's specific threshold before submitting a COI prevents the most common rejection scenario for KeHE onboarding.
Like UNFI, KeHE requires the AI endorsement to be by name, not blanket. KeHE has a specific endorsement requirement that the AI language cover "ongoing and completed operations" — language that some standard GL AI endorsements don't include. A GL policy with an AI endorsement that only covers "ongoing operations" will fail KeHE's compliance check, because product liability claims against KeHE often arise after the products-completed operations phase of your brand's relationship with the distributor. Your broker needs to verify this specific language when requesting the endorsement from your carrier.
Both UNFI and KeHE have vendor portals that specify current requirements. The most important step is to pull the current requirement documentation from the portal — not to rely on your broker's templates or previous submissions to other distributors. Requirements change. Entity names change. Minimum limits get updated. The portal documentation is the authoritative source, and a broker who's submitting to UNFI or KeHE without pulling the current portal requirements is working from outdated information.
The four fields most commonly wrong on first-submission COIs are: (1) certificate holder entity name — wrong legal name or wrong format; (2) additional insured language — blanket instead of by-name endorsement; (3) waiver of subrogation — stated in description of operations instead of as a policy endorsement; and (4) policy expiration date — submitting a certificate within 30 days of policy expiration, which distributors reject. Auditing these four fields before submission catches the vast majority of compliance failures.
If you're onboarding with both UNFI and KeHE simultaneously — which many natural channel brands do — produce separate certificates for each distributor. Don't modify a single certificate to list both distributors as certificate holders. That creates ambiguity about the AI endorsement and the waiver of subrogation, and both distributors will reject it. Two clean, separate certificates, each sized to the specific distributor's requirements, is the only reliable approach when managing dual-distributor onboarding.