Re: Tioga Fresh Meeting

[Rebecca Heller-Steinberg]

Hi Everyone,

We had a small but productive meeting last week. We discussed the online farmers market models that Laura Hobbs and I researched and narrowed it down to a few. Laura will send those out, and we'd love to several people check them out and give feedback so we can select one to use.

I am attaching the results from a survey we did a while ago to help understand what the community was looking for and how much demand there was for something like this. About 55 people took the survey. The Survey Results attachment tallies up the overall responses for each question, and the Comments attachment has all the comments and other responses people filled in. It's probably best to read the 2 documents side by side to get the best understanding of the responses. As we move forward with planning, it will be good to keep some of this information in mind.

Rebecca

On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 2:06 PM, Christine Wilson <sustaina...@hotmail.com> wrote:

Hello Everyone,  

As most of you know Marvin Moyer, of Twin Brook Farm, has been setting up meetings with local farmers, members of Cornell Cooperative, and other local individuals discussing ways to bring the consumer closer to our local farm products in Tioga County.  The group is meeting again to continue discussion on Thursday, December 6^th at 4pm in the County Office Building, room 106.    

Thank you for your time and let me know if you plan to attend.  

For those of you who don't know who I am my name is Christine Wilson.  I am a friend of Marv's who shares the same compassion about wanting to make the wonderful local products our farmers have to offer easier for our local consumers to purchase.  I also help with OweGoGreen website with Paul and Laura Sage.    

Christine 

[Laura Hobbs]

Greetings,

On behalf of the members of the Tioga Fresh group who attended the last meeting, I am passing on some notes from the last meeting and a request for input.

As Rebecca mentioned in a recent email to you all, we had a meeting last week and we discussed the research done on online farmers market options. The group at the meeting decided to send out links of all the good possibilities to the larger group. 

We need a few people to check out these website and provide some feedback on the option(s) you like best. 

In general all these websites provide the functions we need: the farmer enters in available products to website, the customer shops from the list of our local products, customers place order online, pay online and the website will keep track of the orders and send the info on the items ordered to the individual farmers. The websites all charge a few % on sales to cover costs mainly the credit card fees. After the Farmers receive the orders from the customers they will bring the items to a pre-determined place and time. 

Here are the websites:

Local Food MarketPlace

http://localfoodmarketplace.com/LFM/Content.aspx?content=howitworks

This one shows how it works and the following link  shows some examples of websites made for other markets. This one costs for making us a website, but at the meeting the possibility of some grant funding was discussed.

http://localfoodmarketplace.com/LFM/Partners.aspx

LocallyGrown.Net

http://locallygrown.net/

If you look into this one you will see there are MANY virtual Farmers Markets set up with this website's template.

Fresh Nation

For farmers:

http://freshnation.com/markets_and_vendors

For customers:

http://freshnation.com/

Wholeshare

http://www.wholeshare.com/help

http://www.wholeshare.com/help/videos

This is an existing local food co-op website that could add "Tioga Fresh"(our group of farmers) as one of its' local vendors for a coop in Tioga County. Using Wholeshare for Tioga Fresh was a bit complicated since individual farmers can't enter their products, a Coordinator would have to gather all the items from the farmers and enter them but the % fees could cover that coordinators' work.

We could try Wholeshare as our online market website 

OR 

by scheduling the pick up for Wholeshare to occur at the same time as our Tioga Fresh pick-up(using a different website from above) we could incorporate some the original idea of a local foods store by offering a large variety of NY produced pantry products(like flour or nuts) or other items alongside our Tioga Fresh products.

On behalf of Tioga Fresh Group - Thanks for your time!

Laura Hobbs, Heritage Pastures

la...@stantonhillstudios.com

BTW - I have started a Wholeshare buying club after I found about it and what great local and speciality foods and good prices that were available with Wholeshare. Please contact me directly if you want to check it out. I can send you an invite and you can log in to see all the available products.  Sorry for the shameless self promotion! :)

[Laura Hobbs]

Hi Tioga Fresh followers! Happy New Year!

On behalf of the Tioga Fresh Group I am resending this request for input from the email below I sent out in December. The Holidays are now over and hopefully you will have time now to check out the websites below that we could use to help Tioga County farmers sell local farm products via the internet.

Any input is helpful - even just to say that "this website looks the prettiest or seems the best". Even further input is also very welcomed.

Thank you so much!

Laura Hobbs & the rest of the Tioga Fresh Group

PS: Another shameless promotion for the new Owego/Tioga County Wholeshare group I am starting:

Here is an invite to join the group to find out more about saving money buying in bulk on local products and great imported items too. No obligation when you sign in just to look around and see if you like the products & prices! No cost to join. Click link below. Contact me with any questions as well!

 wholeshare.com/join/1425

Begin forwarded message:

From: Laura Hobbs <la...@stantonhillstudios.com>

Date: December 12, 2012 2:43:40 PM EST

Subject: Tioga Fresh- last Meeting notes

[Kevin and Lisa Engelbert]

Hi Laura and everyone:

 

I looked at these models when Laura first sent the email back in December and intended to reply, but it got lost in the shuffle.  Looking at the models below, I like the Wholeshare model the best.  It does seem pretty similar to the localfoodmarketplace.com site, but seems more user friendly and clear to me.

 

After talking with Laura yesterday about the Wholeshare concept, it seems like it could fit well with what we are trying to do.  It would eliminate having to staff a store, which was always a concern.

 

It will be interesting to see everyone else’s thoughts.

 

Thanks.

 

Lisa Engelbert

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[Rebecca Heller-Steinberg]

Hi everyone,

I haven't seen many people give feedback on the website options, so I thought I'd weigh in even though I'm not a producer. I currently use Wholeshare as part of a group in Binghamton and in my opinion it is the easiest of these models to get off the ground. Because Wholeshare gives access to other products through Regional Access (RA), you don't have that classic chicken and egg conundrum - where producers don't want to sign up until you have enough customers and vice versa. With Wholeshare you can get a bunch of customers signed up and ordering regularly from RA and add local producers as you go. It also allows customers more of a one-stop shopping approach because they can purchase things like flour, dry beans, grains, oil, etc. in addition to the locally produced items. Wholeshare also gives the ability to "curate" the RA catalog and not offer certain types of products if we feel they overlap too much with offerings from local producers. The only drawback I see is that adding a lot of local producers could get confusing.

The other websites all look good too. Of those, I'd lean towards Local Food Marketplace because of both aesthetics and functionality, but then there is the issue of start-up cost.

What do others think? Which model(s) would you be willing to use?

Rebecca

[Tioga Local Food]

Hello,

I'm Liz Herman, the new AmeriCorps intern at CCE (Gardening and Local Foods Associate).  I'm new to the group, but will be helping to facilitate the creation of the new online farmer's market. 

I took a brief look at the four website options, and I must say, there didn't seem to be a lot of information available. Perhaps I simply overlooked it, but I couldn't find any pricing/cost information for any of the sites except for LocallyGrown.Net.  I did like that this website gave lots of information, that it was free to start up, and only charged 3% of sales revenue.  It's not as slick as Local Food Marketplace, but it seemed very functional and relatively easy to navigate.  I didn't particularly care for the Fresh Nation site.

However, I do agree with Rebecca that it might make sense to go through Wholeshare, if this is already in place and already has a solid customer base.  It would depend if someone was willing to be a Coordinator, as growers themselves can't submit items. 

I'll be taking another look later this afternoon with Susannah, and will let everyone know what she thinks. 

All the best,
Liz

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Gardening and Local Foods Associate
Cornell University Cooperative Extension
56 Main St.
Owego NY 13827
(607) 687-4020