Mayo Clinic spends like the large integrated health system it is. Across its Rochester, Minnesota campus, Florida, Arizona, and the Mayo Clinic Health System sites, it buys medical and surgical supplies, lab and imaging equipment, pharmaceuticals, IT and software, construction and facilities work, food service, professional services, and the long tail of MRO (maintenance, repair, operations) goods that keep hospitals running. If you sell something a hospital, a research lab, or a large employer uses, there is a category for it.
The good news for a founder reading this: Mayo runs an open supplier registration portal, not a closed list you can only join by referral. The harder news: registering is step one of several, and a profile sitting in a database does nothing on its own. Here is how the process actually works.
What Mayo Clinic buysMayo's purchasing splits roughly into clinical and non-clinical spend. Clinical covers med/surg consumables, capital equipment, implants and devices, lab reagents, and pharmacy. Non-clinical covers IT and digital, construction and real estate, facilities and food, marketing and print, travel, and professional and consulting services.
That split matters for positioning. Clinical categories are heavily governed by group purchasing organizations (GPOs), value-analysis committees, and existing contracts, so breaking in there as a new vendor is slow and evidence-driven. Non-clinical and indirect categories tend to have more room for new suppliers, especially regional and diverse firms, because the buying is less locked into national GPO agreements. If you are deciding where to aim first, aim where the door opens wider.
How registration actually worksMayo asks interested suppliers to register and build a company profile in the Mayo Clinic Supplier Development portal. Registration runs through mc.starssmp.com (a STARS SMP-hosted supplier management system, not SAP Ariba or Coupa). On the portal, look for "New to the Portal?" and click "Register your company." You complete an initial sign-up, then a fuller company profile.
The profile is more than name and address. It captures general company and commodity information, your diversity classification, business experience, and an extended company profile. The commodity codes are the part founders skip and then wonder why nobody finds them. Mayo's sourcing team and category managers search that database by commodity. If you code yourself loosely or leave fields blank, you do not surface in the searches that matter.
Treat the profile like an SEO problem for a private search engine. Use the most specific commodity codes that fit, write the company description for a category manager who has never heard of you, and keep certifications and capabilities current.
For questions about the registration process, Mayo's Supply Chain Management Customer Support line is 507-266-5551. Use it. A two-minute call to confirm you coded a category correctly is worth more than a perfectly formatted email into a general inbox.
How to get noticed (registration is not a pipeline)Registering puts you in the database. It does not put you in a sourcing event. The suppliers who convert do three things beyond the form.
First, they match a real need. Mayo's category managers go to the supplier database when they have a sourcing event or a gap in an existing category. Your job is to be findable for the category they are actually buying, with proof you have done it for a comparable health system or large enterprise.
Second, they bring evidence. Health systems are conservative buyers for good reasons. References, outcomes, compliance documentation, and a credible answer to "who else your size have you served" carry more weight than a polished deck.
Third, they show up where supplier diversity and supply chain teams already look. Many large health systems recruit through NMSDC and WBENC regional councils, industry conferences, and matchmaker events. If you are certified, those rooms are where a relationship starts before a portal profile ever gets opened.
The diversity-certification angleMayo runs a Supplier Development Program (its supplier diversity effort) whose stated purpose is an inclusive procurement process with fair and equal opportunity for suppliers to be considered when Mayo sources goods and services. The portal explicitly collects your diversity information as part of the profile, which tells you the classification is read, not decorative.
What earns that classification is third-party certification, not self-attestation. For minority-owned firms that means an NMSDC-affiliated MBE certification; for women-owned firms a WBENC WBE; veteran-owned firms typically certify through the federal SDVOSB/VOSB process or NaVOBA; LGBTQ-owned firms through NGLCC; and disability-owned firms through Disability:IN. Mayo's diversity page confirms the program exists, but its exact published roster of accepted certifying bodies was not loadable at the time of writing, so confirm which certifications it recognizes directly with the supplier diversity team before you bank on one. If you are weighing which certification opens the most corporate doors generally, our NMSDC certification guide walks through what MBE status gets you and how the process runs.
A certification you hold but have not loaded into your portal profile does no work. Upload the certificate, enter the expiration, and renew on time.
If you are early and the certification paperwork feels like a second job, that is the problem CertifyAll was built to remove: capture your business information and documents once, then generate and submit the applications. And if you want your certified profile visible to buyers actively searching for diverse suppliers, listing in our supplier directory puts you in front of procurement teams who use it for exactly that.
The Tier-2 side doorLarge health systems frequently buy more through their prime vendors than they do directly, which is where Tier-2 (second-tier) spend comes in. A prime supplier or distributor that already holds a Mayo contract subcontracts a portion of that work to a diverse firm and reports it back as second-tier diverse spend. For a smaller supplier, becoming a subcontractor to one of Mayo's existing primes can be a faster path than winning a direct contract from scratch.
Mayo's published supplier materials confirm the supplier diversity program and the registration portal; whether it operates a formal, named Tier-2 program with public reporting was not something the available pages confirmed. Treat Tier-2 as a strategy to raise with both Mayo's supplier diversity contact and with the prime distributors in your category, rather than a published program you simply enroll in. Even where it is informal, primes serving health systems carry diverse-spend goals of their own, so a certified subcontractor is genuinely useful to them.
Where to start this weekRegister at mc.starssmp.com, code your commodities precisely, and load whatever certification you hold. If you do not yet have one, decide which certification fits your ownership and get it moving, because it is the field a supplier diversity team filters on. Then go find the relationship the portal alone will not create.
Mayo is one health system with one portal and one set of category managers. The same registration, certification, and Tier-2 mechanics repeat across hundreds of corporate and hospital buyers, each with its own portal and its own gaps. Our corporate program directory maps those programs so you can spend your registration effort where your category actually has a buyer.
