Fresh connection

If someone took Facebook, LinkedIn and eBay, rolled them into one website and made it exclusively for use by buyers and farmers, you would get FarmersWeb, a wholesale management tool and online marketplace for buyers and farmers. Founded in January 2011 and put into operation in October that same year, FarmersWeb has been helping buyers find farmers and vice versa for a year now.

While working for a distributor of local food, Jennifer Goggin, co-founder and president of FarmersWeb, noticed a fundamental problem in the local food movement; while plenty of demand exists for local products from chefs and wholesale buyers, and farmers are keen to tap these markets for their goods, there was no easy way for the two sides to directly connect.

“Farmers were looking for a way to ask for wholesale customers,” Goggin says. “We decided to build this public marketplace that would connect the two groups and make that process really easy for both the farms to find the buyers and the buyers to find the farms that offer products at wholesale prices.”

Wrapping up its first year in operation, FarmersWeb has been gaining users, but is currently only available to the New York, New Jersey and Connecticut areas.

“The idea is to keep everything within a regional scale,” Goggin says.

FarmersWeb has won over its customers with great service and an easy-to-use format. Here’s how FarmersWeb is helping connect farmers and buyers in an effort to provide top-quality local foods.

Making local food easier to find
The objective FarmersWeb and Goggin wanted to achieve was to provide a service that would take the hassle out of buyers’ and farmers’ struggles to connect with one another.

“Before we started this, the gap we were trying to fill was that the farms would have to either depend on incoming calls or emails from buyers, or call out to buyers to take their orders and make sure the buyer pays the order,” Goggin says. “On the buyer’s side, the buyer would have to research and find the farms they want to work with and then have to call every farm to find out that day’s availability and price and then place the order. It was all based on phone, email or fax, which is a pretty difficult way to run a business.”

Another thing that Goggin noticed was that with that old process, the information flow was not up-to-date.

“A lot of farms will send out their availability list to customers once a week,” she says. “By the time a buyer calls in four or five days later, that farm could very well have run out of some of those things. It’s really hard to manage that real-time information flow without an online website like ours.”

Farm operations such as Migliorelli Farms in the Hudson Valley region of New York have greatly appreciated not having to take time away from farm work to respond to faxes and calls for orders.

“The old way we distributed was we sent the buyer out a fax and they had to fill it out and fax it back to us,” says Greg Pinelli, logistics and marketing manager for Migliorelli Farms. “Now with the technology they click a button, select the quantity they want and it’s a lot more efficient. They’re saving time by not having to read through a fax and fax it back out and we don’t have to spend our time going back and forth to the office waiting for a fax or a phone call. We can just look at our phone and say, ‘We just had another FarmersWeb order.’”

FarmersWeb isn’t the only company of this nature, but its customers have been very pleased with the service. Buyers such as The Good Table, a corporate catering company who was a pilot FarmersWeb client, have switched to FarmersWeb from other services.

“We started with Basis Foods when we first started buying organics out of Manhattan,” says Keith Taplin, executive chef at The Good Table. “They had a lot of problems as far as delivery supply and demand when it came to certain products that I wanted to buy. I would place an order and once the day the delivery was supposed to come, I only received half the order. So they had some communication problems between the farms and themselves. That relationship kind of fell apart.

“When Jennifer Goggin came forward and told us she was starting FarmersWeb, she communicated to us that you actually order directly from the farms. The entire time I’ve worked with FarmersWeb I’ve never had a problem with receiving the number of items that I needed to order, so that’s been real smooth.”

Because buyers can order products directly from farms, the service has improved the way farms can go about selling their products.

“Instead of sitting at markets for 11 hours with a truckload of product trying to sell it and waiting for people to come stop by your stand to buy your product, now they can just go online, see what they want, put in their order and we send it to them,” Pinelli says. “It takes the hours away.”

How it works
Goggin and her team at FarmersWeb didn’t just want to create a way to connect buyers and farmers, but they also wanted that service to be easy to use.

“It’s very easy to get involved,” Goggin says. “They just have to go on to our website and push ‘create an account.’”

Buyers fill out a profile that has their address and their delivery instructions, which gets transmitted to every farm that they place an order with. When a buyer logs on, they can browse by product category, by a specific farm, or by delivery date.

After they browse and find the items they are interested in, they place those items in their cart and they check out one time with a credit card, whether they are placing an order from one farm or 20. It simplifies the entire transaction for them.

“Those orders are then sent to the farm who will confirm if they still have those products,” she says. “Once that order is confirmed, the buyer and the farm both have the record of that order on their account. The farm can print out loading slips for all the orders, and the buyer can print out receiving slips and then the farm will be able to ship their products by whatever date the buyer has requested for delivery.”

From the farmer’s perspective, they create a profile which tells a little bit more about themselves and what they want to communicate to the buyers about their story and their growing method.

“They fill out their inventory list, which is very easy to maintain, and their delivery settings,” Goggin says. “The farms can either deliver the products themselves … or we can hook the farm up with a logistics provider who can do the deliveries for them. Whatever way they choose to do, on their delivery settings they’ll say, ‘I deliver to these areas on this date and I need orders four days in advance.’ All those are automatically enforced by the system. When a farm sees an order, theoretically it should match their criteria.”

So far, Goggin’s plan to make the website user-friendly has been a success.

“The website is really easy to use,” Taplin says. “What I like to do is go in there and I’ll have something in mind like a couple of cheeses, so I’ll just look up under the heading of cheese and then the farms will come up and their locations and what they have and the quantities that they have. Another good thing that I like about the way Jennifer operates is she can get me a little blurb on the farm that we are buying things from. We like to put that up so people can see what’s being served that day or that week and which farm it comes from and a little bit about the farm and what they do. Any restaurant or food service establishment could benefit from saying that they’re buying locally grown and organic.”

Migliorelli Farms has also found the process to be easy and beneficial.

“They have set it up nicely,” Pinelli says. “We go on there every Monday and set up our availability to send out to all the restaurants we deal with. It’s pretty simple. We already have the products listed on there, and you just click active or not active and that’s what they see, and they place orders for what they want.”

FarmersWeb doesn’t charge buyers or farmers to sign up for the service, but does charge a small transaction fee to the farm, which lowers as the volume of sales goes up.

“We realize this system is really most valuable for farms, and they’re using it to manage all of their incoming orders,” Goggin says. “If FarmersWeb is the fourth way they’re getting orders — they’re taking phone orders, they’re getting emails, they’re getting faxes and they have to file the orders from us — you want to encourage them, not penalize them for bringing on all their customers to the site.”

FarmersWeb offers a good mix of different buyers and farms to choose from.

“We have fruit and vegetable farmers, a lot of meat and cheese and dairy co-ops, and we have people that bring some value-added products like jams made from local fruit,” she says. “We don’t have any greenhouse growers yet, but we would love to have them because for our buyers, that means they can buy local vegetables all year round, which is the big selling point.”

That means this is an opportunity for you to get involved, provided you’re within FarmersWeb’s territory, but you can also look for similar programs in your area, or perhaps one day, FarmersWeb will be in your area. While FarmersWeb is still very young, it has a growing client base and a happy one. Goggin plans to continue finding new users and is getting ready to expand services outside the New York metro area down the East coast from Portland, Maine, to Washington D.C., with Boston and Philadelphia as major markets in between.

She says, “That’s the biggest change on the horizon.”

Gregory Jones is a Cleveland-based freelance writer and frequent contributor for Produce Grower.

How to Reach: FarmersWeb, www.farmersweb.com