The farmers market is moving online

guest · Aug 24, 2021

The farmers market is moving online
The pandemic brought rampant growth for local food distribution platforms
August 23, 2021
https://www.theverge.com/22618396/farmers-market-online-local-food-distribution-platforms

Then the pandemic came, and it hit farms hard. Supply chains, customer bases, and in some cases labor were upended. Small and medium-sized independent farms that relied on restaurant wholesale lost huge percentages of their business overnight. Some local CSAs folded. Some farming operations went belly up.

Others, however, found a new path online. Farmer-specific e-commerce apps and services — among them, GrazeCart, Farmdrop, Farmigo, and GrownBy — have cropped up in recent years, offering the direct-to-consumer sales, customizable CSAs, preorders and delivery that farmers markets haven’t. When the pandemic began, this tech offered a new world of possibility.
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Donck and Jarrard were among the farmers who took the leap. When food distribution chains collapsed and people turned to local food, the pair made the snap decision to eliminate their old-school CSA program, lean into their relationships with two tech-based distribution platforms with which they’d already worked, and transition the rest of their business to sales and distribution platform Barn2Door.

They’re not alone. One of three digital platforms they now work with, Barn2Door, reported a 457 percent increase in revenue from orders and an 807 percent increase in the number of orders among their sellers in March 2020 alone.
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As this trend progresses, a growing number of local chefs, and eventually consumers, have come to apps like WhatsGood to connect with independent producers online.
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