On Tuesday, Feb. 11, Square and Whole Foods Market announced a new partnership. The goal of this partnership is, “to make shopping faster and more convenient with new on-the-go purchasing options.”¹ These on-the-go payments will allow Whole Foods customers to bypass the main check-out lines while shopping at, “in-store venues — including sandwich counters, juice and coffee bars, pizzerias, and beer and wine bars.”²

These in-store venues will now have accept payments using either the Square Register or Square Stand (above) and drastically reduce the average check-out time. What’s more, “At select venues, Whole Foods Market will offer customers the option to use a mobile device to pay using Square Wallet, Square’s payer application, thereby avoiding the traditional front-end checkout lines.”³ This is a major partnership for Square, and testament to the growing success of the company led by Jack Dorsey, one of the creators of Twitter. While this is Square’s first partnership with a national grocery store chain, the company is no stranger to massive deals. Way back in August of 2012, Square announced a massive partnership with Starbucks, which included the Seattle company investing $25 million into the mobile payment company.⁴

The Whole Foods Market partnership is just the latest news in what has been a productive several months for Square. Back in October, Square announced a new service, Square Cash. “Square Cash allows users to send payments without any transaction fees to individuals through email. Transfers are 100% free for both the recipient and the sender.”⁵ Further, according to a VentureBeat article, Square has also inked deals with Uniqlo – a Japanese clothing retailer – and Godiva.⁶

It will be interesting to follow this partnership, especially in the wake of the massive downward spike in the Whole Foods Market stock price on Thursday.⁷