“During the nine years that we did business with them,” Marks says, “it was amazing to me how much autonomy regional buyers and even store-level buyers had to bring in local products and make deals with small, local producers.”

AtlantaFresh’s defining moment—and finally, its undoing—came in June 2015. A Whole Foods representative approached Marks at a trade show, he says, and mentioned that the company was very interested in getting more grass-fed, certified non-GMO milk on the shelves. “You think you could supply that to us?” Marks remembers him asking.

It was a treasured opportunity, but it was also 2016 where the trouble started.

At the time, Marks was working with a local farmer, Richard Watson of Newberry Farm in Waynesboro, Georgia, who’d changed his conventional dairy over to a herd of 700 fully grass-fed cows. Marks would have needed to dramatically upgrade his facility if he was going to supply Whole Foods at scale, but he and Watson determined that it would be financially feasible if the grocer could provide a sizable guaranteed purchase order: 30,000 gallons of milk per week.

Whole Foods agreed to commit to that volume, and ultimately awarded AtlantaFresh a seven-year contract that Marks says was worth $100 million—more than $15 million at wholesale price each year. It was going to be a major investment, and it would have meant that Whole Foods suddenly swallowed up a huge proportion of AtlantaFresh’s sales (about 90 percent). But it would also have taken the company from about $2 million in annual revenue, Marks figured, to more than seven times that.

Photo courtesy of Whole Foods

He decided the risk was worth it. “At times, I really thought, ‘Gee, does it really make sense to take on this much debt?,’” he tells me. “But given my history with my partner at Whole Foods and the amount of money it represented, it seemed like a sure bet.”

It took about a year to build the fresh milk program. AtlantaFresh had to completely revamp its facility, putting in industrial-scale pasteurizing equipment and a bottling line. Whole Foods gave the company a $500,000 loan, and Marks took out another $2 million in loans to finance the rest.

But as the facility was being built, Whole Foods was undergoing changes of its own. In February of 2016, The Wall Street Journal reported that the company was going to start “whittling away” at the autonomy it had long provided to its stores; in April, at the Natural Products Expo West trade show, Whole Foods’ global vice president of purchasing told a packed conference room of food entrepreneurs that the company was going to start doing business more like a normal grocery store, taking a more national approach to its suppliers.

It’s hard to say whether that shift away from local suppliers doomed the AtlantaFresh milk program. But by the time Marks made his first product shipment, in July 2016, Whole Foods’ enthusiasm seemed to him to have waned.