This story originally appeared on BizWest Media on April 9, 2021. It is currently paywalled.

BOULDER — Just days before it announced the closure of its Longmont store, Alfalfa’s Market Inc. was behind on payments to the tune of millions of dollars on merchandise from vendors, which could hamper its attempts to turn around its fortunes after shuttering two of its three stores.

Internal documents obtained exclusively by BizWest showed that the longtime natural foods grocer was past due in paying hundreds of its vendors and potentially putting those businesses at risk of carrying bad debt or losing cash flow that’s critical for staying in business.

According to a list of companies that provide goods and services to the Market, as of mid March, Alfalfa’s owed more than $4.18 million to 273 vendors. Almost half of that amount was more than 90 days past due.

The company shut down its longtime Boulder store in the last week of February, attributing the closure to decreased sales and high rents. At the time, Alfalfa’s said it would keep its Longmont store open, but then shuttered that location in late March. That store was open for just longer than five months.

Alfalfa’s Market declined to make president Mark Homlish or anyone else available for an interview and declined to comment specifically on any particular vendor relationship, citing confidentiality.

In response to detailed questions about the company’s obligations and its strategy to manage that debt with only the Louisville store, the Market called the figures obtained by BizWest an “incorrect and incomplete” picture of the company’s financial health at any given time.

The company said it would not provide financial information because it is privately held and would not comment on its obligations to vendors.

“Any financial information shared … does not reflect the current financial situation of the company, nor would it have provided a complete picture of our financial health at any given point in time. We are doing everything we can to work with our vendors and ensure they are paid,” the company said in its statement.

The vendor list is a “moment-in-time” snapshot, and it’s possible that the company has made payments to suppliers since then.

The documents are a rare look inside a business credited as one of the linchpins of Boulder’s natural-foods scene and how the company’s financial difficulties have affected a number of small vendors that survive on timely cash flows.

BizWest verified the authenticity of the documents by speaking to five vendors that divulged how much they were owed at the time by Alfalfa’s. In each case, those figures were within a few hundred dollars of what the specific vendor is listed as being owed in Alfalfa’s documents, and in one case exactly matched the figure.

Not all of the vendor balance is specifically owed to natural-foods producers and suppliers. The documents showed the company owing Louisville Alfalfa’s LLC $674,853, with just more than $546,000 of that more than 90 days past due. That entity owns the Louisville location.

That’s separate from the $67,310 Alfalfa’s owed to the landlord of the Longmont store, and the $501,861 listed in back rent for the longtime Boulder location.

While the company’s other key financial documents such as its balance sheet or profit-andloss statements are private, the closure of its Boulder and Longmont stores provides some signs that the company was struggling and ultimately passing some of those struggles to its suppliers.

Hundreds of vendors past due The majority of the unpaid accounts were held by vendors owed less than $5,000, with 196 suppliers being owed $260,932. Several of those accounts were months past due, which stretched the credibility of the Alfalfa’s name in the eyes of its vendors.

Kurt Hans, the founder and CEO of Ampersand Coffee Roasters LLC in Boulder, told BizWest that his company stopped supplying Alfalfa’s several weeks ago because it had $12,333 in outstanding invoices, including $3,342 that was 90 days past due as of March 23.

That $3,342 figure exactly matched the amount the vendor documents listed as being owed to Ampersand.

Alfalfa’s was about $22,000 past due with Ampersand in the fall of 2019 but caught up during the earlier months of the pandemic due to grocery stores in general having more business, Hans said.

However, he said the Market stopped paying invoices in late November 2020. Hans said that Homlish has apologized to him personally for the lack of payment; Hans anticipates restarting its deliveries to Alfalfa’s in Louisville once it sees a turnaround in the existing debt.