Dive Brief:

• Whole Foods Market announced it will partner with Infor to build out a cloud-based platform.

• Whole Foods said the new platform will help with its merchandising and supply chain activities.

• The company is hoping to use technology as a differentiator as it faces growing competition in the natural and organic food categories.

Dive Insight:

CEO Walter Robb said he wants to use technology to differentiate Whole Foods from a growing number of competitors. The company has already adopted some technologies, like Instacart and Apple Pay, but the new partnership with Infor will tackle merchandising and supply chain.

Robb said the new system will eventually capture attributes on every product sold at the store and allow the store to send data back to suppliers on how products are selling.

"It's leveraging modern technology to expand the scope of how we look at retail and add the Whole Foods flavor to it," said Whole Foods CIO and executive vice president Jason Buechel.

In turn, business enterprise software company Infor hopes to use Whole Foods as a testing ground for developing the new platform, which could eventually be used by other companies.