Join us for a demo to see Marketplace and Connect in action!

Why Did We Build Connect?

We see Connect as the foundation of our vision to grow & scale the local food ecosystem. There is no local food ecosystem without the supply—the farmers that grow the food. Our goal is to help farmers grow without being overtaxed with administrative tasks. The Connect app will open new opportunities to farmers by giving them one place to manage all online and offline sales.

How Can Connect Help Farmers and Producers?

Everything From One Account: The explosive increase in online sales over the past few years has helped more customers access local foods. But if a single farm is selling to two or three different online stores or farmers markets, that can mean two or three different account logins, two or three different platforms to learn, and two or three different inventories to manage. Local Food Connect solves this real-world problem by offering farmers one app where they can manage their sales to all channels, including food hubs currently using LFM and even in-person transactions at farm stands and markets.

• Manage Inventory: Avoid overselling products or miscounting inventory by having one place to view and manage your total inventory, while also having the option to break it down by each store. 
• Create Consolidated Harvest Lists: Be ready for harvest days by using Connect to print clear harvest checklists or keep track on your mobile device, assign tasks to different harvest crews, and even print packing labels. Connect will do the work without the complicated spreadsheets.

Stay Organized & Plan: To know how much food to grow, where to focus sales, or just to plan for the season ahead, farmers need good data. Rather than running sales reports from several different sources and having to manually combine information, use Connect to access all of your data in one place.

• Integrated information: Use the app to get a quick glance on what’s coming up for the week, what you’ve sold, and what you’re low on.
• Simplify Reporting: Spend less time juggling spreadsheets, and more time growing your business. Connect provides report templates to get you started, but all your reports can be fully customized.

Get Paid Faster: The last thing a producer should spend time on is chasing down payments. Connect can help you get paid faster and easier than ever.

• Automation: Food hubs and markets that use LFM will be able to automate payments to their producers through Connect.
• Take Payments: Connect integrates with Square terminals to process payments in-person at farms and farmers markets.

User Friendly: Local Food Connect was designed to be easy and accessible.

• Mobile First: Connect is formatted for phones and tablets, so you can use the app on the farm, at the market, and on the go!
• Easy product mapping: Does one site sell your products as “Apples, Green” while your own inventory lists them “green apples”? Connect can automatically map these product names so you can have a more accurate idea of your sales and inventory.

How Can Connect Help Food Hubs and Online Markets?

We believe that the new Connect app will also help current subscribers to our Local Food Marketplace, by helping you better connect to producers you work with.

Payments: Pay your producers directly through Connect (available in Spring 2022). Save time on billing and keep track of payments in one place.

Easier for producers: Producers are experiencing platform fatigue with too many systems to learn. Connect’s simple, mobile-first design offers a fast and easy way for producers to update products they list on your marketplace, create harvest lists, pack lists and more! 

It’s free for producers to get started using Connect with your LFM site.

The post Announcing: Local Food Connect first appeared on Local Food Marketplace.

So why should farmers bring together their online and offline sales? Here are a few critical reasons:

Better Customer Experience

• • Increased profits
    • By offering different sales channels, you can increase your customer reach. Many customers may prefer ordering online vs at your farmstand, store, or farmers market, and even the other way around.
  • Better customer experience & information
    • An integrated system provides a better customer experience – for example, customers can use account credits while shopping at your farmstand the same way they can use them online.
    • Regardless of where a customer makes their purchase with your farm, with the LFM system you can access complete customer purchasing and transaction history.

Better Data for Business Decisions

• • Up to date inventory – always!
    • Integrating all sales enables farms to have better inventory and information on what products are selling where.  Many farms find it challenging to track their product sales at farmers markets and farmstands and hence don’t have accurate data to make decisions.  Pulling that information into the same system used for online sales provides better information for decision making.
  • Valuable sales information at your fingertips
    • Where do you sell the most? What sells the best and where?
    • Using the LFM platform you can easily and quickly pull the data you need to make better business decisions at no additional cost!

Consolidated Reporting

• • No more tedious spreadsheets!
    • By integrating your online and offline sales with a platform like LFM, you can eliminate costly human errors and time consuming data entry.
  • Your entire farm can work from the same information.
    • From harvest team to pack team to the sales team, LFM utilizes specific users, reports, and features to maximize the information shared with your essential team members.
  • All your revenue in one place.
    • The key to successfully increasing profits is being able to monitor your revenue and margins all in one place. A cohesive revenue report that reflects your omnichannel sales is a direct way to a better business.
    • At LFM we offer robust, comprehensive reporting to all of our customers with no strings attached. We believe your data is yours, and it is essential for increasing your bottom line.

Marketing Integration

• • Use the data to send targeted messages
    • LFM now offers Mailchimp Integration to streamline your marketing! Quickly and easily compose targeted email campaigns to your customers based on data like first and last order dates, subscriptions, and more.
    • Create custom shopping lists and featured product lists that link directly to your storefront to embed directly in your Mailchimp emails.
    • Other popular examples of targeted messaging:
      • Send pre-order reminders to farmers market attendees.
      • Send event invitations and pickup reminders to CSA members
      • Send wholesale availability to restaurants, etc.

What are the real world examples?

• • Market style CSAs and shares. Accessing a customer’s account from the farmers market and adjusting for the items they’ve purchased on the fly allows you to track in detail how the customer has used their market style CSA and ensure accurate account details.
  • Customer pre-orders and pays at pickup.
  • Customer has account credit and wants to use it at the farmstand.
  • Farm wants to analyze top selling products for each farmers market.
  • Farm has limited products available and wants to offer them online and offline, without having to remember to update inventory.
  • Food hub has a store or stand and needs to track consigned inventory in store.

What is needed?

• • An easy-to-use customer interface for ordering online
  • An easy-to-use POS system for updating inventory live from the farmers market
  • A robust inventory management system

LFM offers all of these and more to deliver true omni-channel sales.

• • Customer Types & Price Levels
  • Square POS Integration
  • Mailchimp Integration with custom, embeddable featured products and shopping lists directly linked to the storefront
  • Inventory Management
  • Subscription and Membership features
  • Recurring Orders
  • Multiple ordering periods for custom distribution management and logistics optimization
  • Pick up and Delivery locations to coordinate online sales and in person distribution
  • Easy to use order interface for updating online orders with offline sales
  • Robust product setup to customize how and what you sell
  • …and so much more!

The post Boost Your Bottom Line: Integrating Online & Offline Sales for Farmers first appeared on Local Food Marketplace.

You may have noticed a fresh, new look when it comes to Local Food Marketplace! Since our inception in 2009, our humble tomato logo has seen us through our development from a local, direct-to-consumer sales platform to the comprehensive sales and distribution platform it is today. Now, we support nearly 350 food hubs and fresh food markets, and more than 12,000 producers, in the United States and Canada.

Through all of this growth, we’ve made the decision to retire our tomato logo in favor of an inspiring new look. This milestone is a major move for us and the first in many new, exciting things to come to the LFM platform! While our look has been refreshed, we remain true to our original mission. We will continue to be a different kind of tech company – one that seeks to provide a vehicle for success for farmers, local food entrepreneurs, and businesses – enabling them to be more profitable without giving up their brand identity, relationships, or data.

The way consumers purchase food and the way producers sell food has changed dramatically over the last 12 years, and we have continually evolved and grown to anticipate the needs of our customers. This new look represents our role and vision of connecting producers and markets within the local food system by enabling new relationships and opportunities.   

This brand update is also in anticipation of several transformational projects and collaborations that will be announced in the coming months!  

We are excited to create a more connected local food system that maintains the independence of producers and hubs while offering opportunities to expand sales opportunities. Stay tuned for updates on upcoming projects!

The post Introducing a Brand Makeover for Local Food Marketplace first appeared on Local Food Marketplace.

We’ve put together an informative blog series focusing on stories of successful food hubs we’ve worked with for years. In Part 1, we spoke with the Alaska Food Hub and learned the importance of resource sharing when starting a new food hub. In Part 2, we interviewed the Kansas City Food Hub to find out key advice and lessons. Now in Part 3, we met with High Country Food Hub to learn how a demand for local food storage and distribution and utilizing collaboration over competition led to their success.

As new food hubs continue to emerge, we hope this series serves as a valuable resource to those starting out.

Part 3: High Country Food Hub

In February 2016, the Blue Ridge Women in Agriculture joined with the Watauga County Board of Commissioners to create the High Country Food Hub in Boone, North Carolina. As the demand for food storage space from farmers and area food banks grew, the Food Hub saw an opportunity to support local food producers through product storage, aggregation, and distribution.

Starting with just one freezer, the Food Hub quickly outgrew their resources as local ranchers utilized their storage services. With funding from their city government, the Food Hub then expanded into a second freezer to meet the needs of local food producers.

By 2017, the Food Hub knew that a lot of area farmers were applying to farmers markets but were getting turned down due to limited space. Wanting to provide avenues for fresh food sales without competing with long-standing community farmers markets, the Food Hub adopted the LFM platform to bring their market online.

Now in their fourth year of operation, the High Country Food Hub supports over 90 farmers and food producers across three states. We recently had the opportunity to talk with the Food Hub to learn how the demand for cooperative hub resources led them to serving over 3,000 local products for over 300 orders each week.

Key Challenges to Starting the Food Hub

• • Competition vs Collaboration
    • When the High Country Food Hub started, they were mindful of perceived competition from treasured local farmers markets. One of their initial goals was to show farmers and food producers how the Food Hub could be a win-win if everyone worked collaboratively on the effort.
• • Funds for Infrastructure
    • As with all new businesses, funding can prove to be a difficult challenge to overcome when starting out. Due to partnerships with their county government and larger grants, in 2016 the Blue Ridge Women in Agriculture began the High Country Food Hub.
    • In February 2016, the Watauga County Board of Commissioners approved 1,400 square feet of the Watauga County Agricultural Services Center to be transformed into freezers, refrigerators and dry food storage space. Then additional funding came from Heifer USA and the USDA’s Local Food Promotion Program to renovate the space and buy a commercial freezer and cooler.

Learning from Failure

All businesses experience failure on some level, but gleaning lessons from those failures is a key to success. Although the High Country Food Hub was receiving support from governmental agencies, they still struggled with guidance on how to develop the Hub and respond to change, especially when the pandemic began.

In February 2020, a regional grocery store closed, and the Food Hub gained 12 new customers. At that time, that was significant expansion and change for High Country Food Hub. However, by mid-March 2020 when COVID hit, the Food Hub experienced major sudden growth in both customers and sales. By May 2020, they went from 112 to 530 customers and increased sales by $26,000!

“We quickly ran out of cold storage and had to change our processes week to week about how we organize and aggregate orders while dealing with new customers and producers. That transformation was pretty amazing,” says Shannon Carroll, Finance Coordinator for the Hub.

However, too much change can come at a price. Each week the Hub was responding to the pandemic by constantly changing, which ultimately threw off their entire Hub systems, causing more problems than solutions.

Advice for a New Food Hub

Focus on Community Relationships and Collaboration. When COVID-19 changed their operations, The High Country Food Hub worked with the statewide food council and partners at the Carolina Farm Stewardship to connect with major distributor SYSCO. Since SYSCO was not running their refrigerated trucks, the Food Hub connected with SYSCO to borrow their refrigerated trailer.

Soon thereafter, the Food Hub started reaching out to everyone in their network to see what they could borrow to determine what the Hub needed long term. Another unexpected collaboration came in the form of a popular soda company: Dr. Pepper. The Food Hub was able to borrow drink coolers for perishable products to expand their product inventory and support their influx of customers and producers. Additional community collaborations came from their County Economic Commission, the Golden Leaf Foundation, and other statewide foundations to fund another walk-in cooler and more infrastructure for the Food Hub.

Software Solutions with LFM

“LFM really seemed to fit what we needed to do, and was an excellent decision looking back,” states Shannon. Here are key reasons why High Country Food Hub chose LFM:

• • Reasonable start-up costs and the ability to grow as more functionality is needed.
    • The Food Hub started with LFM in 2017, but by 2020 they had grown exponentially. LFM offers customizable packages and modules so you can expand affordably with full support from the Support staff.
• • Tools available to producers for managing their products and inventory easily.
    • LFM provides not only substantial reporting and data tools for Admins, but also for Producers who sell through the sites, too. Shannon says this has even allowed for some of their producers to hire staff for data management.
    • Producers and Admins have the ability to update meat prices to the exact weight of items in inventory and orders. This leads to more accurate sales data, producer payments, and satisfied customers.
• • In-depth data exports for growth management, harvest forecasts, and grant writing.
    • The Food Hub heavily relies on grants and other funding efforts to support their 90+ producers and multi-state customer community. LFM provides exportable, in-depth reports for all aspects of your business or organization. From customer data exports to revenue to items sold vs listed, LFM offers an un-matched reporting database accessible to LFM customers at anytime with no additional fees.
• • A responsive Support staff that offers a clear onboarding process and provides continuous support.
    • From the very start with LFM, the Food Hub was given clear answers and instructions as to how to setup and manage their site. “Amy met with us early on to answer questions that we had, give us a demo, and even connected us to food hubs in Alaska and Hawaii to speak to,” Liz shares. “Nick helped us get everything set up, and even though our Team was tech savvy, we loved the Support on the back end from LFM. The Support Team and step by step process was very helpful in onboarding.”
    • Another aspect to LFM that’s important to the Food Hub is the responsiveness of the LFM Team to feedback, feature requests, and questions. The Hub is excited about upcoming things like EBT payment options through LFM and the educational webinars LFM offers.

We hope you found this interview with the High Country Food Hub to be a valuable resource for starting and managing a food hub.

Want to learn more about how to be a successful food hub?
Check out our blog posts below:

• • Food Hub Success: Pivoting Amid a Crisis with the Kansas City Food Hub
  • Food Hub Success: Key Advice from Alaska Food Hub
  • Higher Than Ever Sales: Market-to-Go at Grow Oak Ridge
  • Worried About Customer Retention: Focus on This
  • Scaling Up to Address Food Security on the Island
  • Download: Food Hub Guide’s to Selling to Restaurants

The post Food Hub Success: How High Country Food Hub Utilized Collaboration Over Competition first appeared on Local Food Marketplace.

We’ve put together an informative blog series focusing on stories of successful food hubs we’ve worked with for years. In Part 1, we spoke with the Alaska Food Hub and learned the importance of resource sharing when starting a new food hub. In part 2, we interviewed the Kansas City Food Hub to find out key advice and lessons.

As new food hubs continue to emerge, we hope this series serves as a valuable resource to those starting out.

Part 2: The Kansas City Food Hub

In 2015, The Kansas City Food Hub was started as a farmer-owned and run cooperative after several feasibility studies confirmed food access needs in the area. As their primary market of wholesale accounts began to grow, the Food Hub knew they needed a sales platform to manage their orders. Originally serving corporate cafeterias, schools, hospitals, restaurants, and institutional buying, the Kansas City Food Hub wanted a multi-channel sales platform that seamlessly communicated with their producers. After some research, in 2018 the Food Hub started using the LFM platform to manage and grow their wholesale accounts, while easily updating products and communicating with producers.

However, shortly after, the Kansas City Food Hub saw a major change in business.  In March of 2020, “every single wholesale order was cancelled with the pandemic,” says Teresa Kelly, Food Hub Manager. Teresa quickly realized the Food Hub needed to immediately shift to direct to consumer sales if they wanted to make it through the pandemic. Soon thereafter, they began offering CSA style boxes as well as home delivery to retail customers throughout the area.

Some key tools of the LFM platform that helped them successfully shift their business were the subscription and routing modules. These features allowed the Kansas City Food Hub to not only save 5-10 hours per week, but made the Food Hub able to manage doubling their sales. “We were hesitant to do door-to-door delivery, but the fact that the Routific integration is available allowed us the opportunity to test if [home delivery] was going to work,” says Katie Nixon, President and Co-Founder of the Kansas City Food Hub.

We recently had the opportunity to speak with President and Co-Founder of the Kansas City Food Hub, Katie Nixon, to learn more about what makes their food hub successful.

Key Challenges to Starting the Food Hub

• • Financing
    • The Kansas City Food Hub leaned heavily on a sub-hub structure to begin. Due to the high costs of starting a food hub, the cooperative decided to rent spaces as their model grew. This meant they rented space from other farmers in their cooperative to fulfill main operations of their food hub. In 2021, they now have expanded into renting aggregation space.
• • Cost of Logistics
    • As the Food Hub’s sales began to grow rapidly, so did their expenses. When shifting from a wholesale to a retail/CSA structure, the cost of logistics grew exponentially. From increased labor needs to boxing to delivery, a key challenge was affording the start-up and growth costs needed to run their food hub.
• • Cooperative Food Hub Model
    • Another key challenge when starting the Kansas City Food Hub was their producer-run and -owned, cooperative model. “People don’t always fully understand cooperatives,” states Katie, “When you join, you are joining this business as a buy-in.”

Learning from Failure

All businesses experience failure, especially when just starting out. Katie shared with us a major failure that proved to be a strong lesson.

A previous director for the Kansas City Food Hub felt it would be a good idea to work with major food distributor US Foods, negotiating big sales of watermelon and sweet corn from a Kansas City Food Hub producer to the distributor. Unfortunately, none of the product ever got sold, leaving the farmer upset and with lots of unsold product.

Advice for a New Food Hub

• • Use research and feasibility studies to give yourself more legitimacy and insight. Do not be afraid to hire outside consulting and connect with organizations to gain a base knowledge of your area. Katie says, “The advice we got from partners and consultants in the beginning are still in effect now.”The Kansas City Food Hub used the findings of the 2019 National Food Hub Survey by the Wallace Center to build the foundation of their hub’s business. By focusing on what caused other food hubs to fail, the Kansas City Food Hub was able to build a successful model from the start. Key takeaways from the report:

• • • Hire experts at the beginning
    • Have your accounting system in place from the start
    • Build a strong foundation for your food hub immediately, so that when chaos hits, you are better prepared to weather the storm.

• • Create a base of reliable, anchor growers to provide consistent product, “and make sure you have the volume,” advises Katie.

• • Focus on a value chain and community relationships. “If we didn’t have the partnerships we had, we wouldn’t be successful,” says Katie. “Because we are small, nimble, and local, our supply chain is really tight. We work more as a value chain rather than a supply chain, and we focus a lot on our partnerships.”

Learn more about LFM and how we support food hubs.

Get your Demo!

Software Solutions with LFM

According to Teresa Kelly, Food Hub Manager, “[LFM] is worth every penny, and I’m surprised at how easy it was!”

The customizable LFM platform was essential for the success of the Kansas City Food Hub. “Having LFM and specifically the Subscriptions Module was the way we were able to manage the rapid change,” says Katie. “We almost doubled our sales, because we were buying and selling retail instead of just moving it through wholesale. LFM made this big shift possible!”

While their sales grew, so did the Food Hub’s expenses like boxing and materials, delivery, increased labor, and more. Wanting to save time and money, the Food Hub knew the needed to migrate away from their spreadsheets and google map logistics methods. Instead, they opted to maximize LFM modules like the Routific Integration and Subscriptions Management. Using the Route and Distribution Management features with the Routific Integration “saved [us] 5-10 hours each week because [we] didn’t have to manually take a spreadsheet and build routes. The integration is so easy!” says Katie.

Another important aspect to the LFM platform that the Kansas City Food Hub loves is the flexibility of LFM to meet the needs of their food hub. The Food Hub has complete control over their ordering period and windows when producers can update their product inventory. From holding inventory of shelf stable items to offering fresh products, the Kansas City Food Hub relies on the seamless integration of the LFM platform.

We hope you found this interview with the Kansas City Food Hub, to be a valuable resource for starting and managing a food hub. Stay tuned to our blog for the next installment in our series focusing on stories of successful food hubs!

Want to learn more about how to be a successful food hub?
Check out our blog posts below:

• • Food Hub Success: Key Advice from Alaska Food Hub
  • Higher Than Ever Sales: Market-to-Go at Grow Oak Ridge
  • Worried About Customer Retention: Focus on This
  • Scaling Up to Address Food Security on the Island
  • Download: Food Hub Guide’s to Selling to Restaurants

The post Food Hub Success: Pivoting Amid a Crisis with the Kansas City Food Hub first appeared on Local Food Marketplace.

Since 2009, Local Food Marketplace has supported hundreds of food hubs by providing a streamlined sales and distribution platform backed by our expert Support staff.

We’ve put together an informative blog series focusing on stories of successful food hubs we’ve worked with for years. As new food hubs continue to emerge, we hope this series serves as a valuable resource to those starting out.

Part 1: The Alaska Food Hub

Starting a food hub is a huge undertaking but doing it from scratch in Alaska has its own unique set of challenges. Despite all the challenges, the Alaska Food Hub emerged in 2016 as the first food hub in Alaska to provide local communities with essential access to fresh, local food and a source of education for emerging food hubs.

Robbi Mixon, Local Food Director for Alaska Food Hub, says the biggest challenge was not having anyone in their area to learn from about starting and running a food hub. However, once the food hub met with Amy McCann, LFM CEO and Co-Founder, they found a source of guidance.

After connecting with LFM and folks at the National Good Food Conference, the Alaska Food Hub was inspired to start digging in and researching what other food hubs were doing. Per the recommendation of Amy, Robbi began talking to any and all food hubs they could.

“[The LFM Team’s] hand holding was super important. It’s why we’ve been so transparent and willing to help others, as it’s something we didn’t have,” says Robbi Mixon.

Now a go-to resource in Alaska, the Alaska Food Hub has come full circle both providing food and guidance to others supporting local food systems and food hubs.

We recently interviewed the Alaska Food Hub and Robbi Mixon to find out what it takes to start and run a successful food hub. 

Major Successes & Wins

There were two major success stories of the Alaska Food Hub. According to Robbi, implementing a project that involved sending food across the bay to fly/boat-in only communities where there is low food access and income barriers to local food was a major success.

When COVID-19 lockdowns began, during a time when many businesses were struggling, the Alaska Food Hub experienced a massive boost. Robbi states that the Alaska Food Hub sold 4x more than what they normally did in the previous 4 years! Using the LFM platform to streamline their sales and distribution processes, the Alaska Food Hub was able to scale their operations to handle their quadrupling in sales and locations they serve.

Learning from Failure

Despite their successful operation, like all businesses they have experienced their fair share of failures. As part of their mission to help other food hubs, Robbi shared an important lesson they learned from a recent failure.

According to Robbi, “Attempting to break into a new and bigger market without the infrastructure to support it,” was a hard lesson learned. A combination of “lack of staffing and money to advertise made attempting to do sales in an area that had a lot of other opportunities for local food was tough.”

At LFM, we have over a decade’s worth of experience working with new, emerging, and expanding food hubs. Being able to manage good growth is integral to a successful business. (Check out our blog post “Getting a Handle on Sudden Growth” to read expert advice on managing business growth!)

Additionally, to help support customers like the Alaska Food Hub, we’ve recently released a new Mailchimp Integration! This integration syncs your customer contact information and email activity with your Mailchimp account, allowing for easy customer management and marketing campaigns.

Key Advice for New Food Hubs

According to Robbi and the Alaska Food Hub, here are three key pieces of advice for new food hubs and how LFM can help you:

• •  Give it a few years before you judge yourselves.

• • • LFM provides a wide-range of robust reports to help you analyze your business thoroughly over time. From revenue reports to customer information exports to granular order item reports, we make your data easy for you to analyze and download.

• •  Relationship building is important and looking at other food hubs in the area as partners as opposed to competition has been key.

• • •  LFM offers discussion forums, regular educational webinars, and other opportunities to connect with other LFM users to all our customers.

• •  Own your mistakes and be transparent.

• • • When running a business, mistakes are bound to happen especially when you’re working with fresh food. Whether product fulfillment falls short, staff and producers get sick, or items break in delivery, LFM offers integrated order and distribution features so you can easily manage order items and emails in bulk! Never leave your customer wondering what happened or where their items went with key features like order notes, customizable invoices, automated updated order confirmations, and bulk credits.

Why Alaska Food Hub Chose Local Food Marketplace

When the Alaska Food Hub started looking for an online sales and distribution platform, they needed key features for the software. After Robbi met with Amy, these were the main reasons the Alaska Food Hub chose LFM:

Due to the everchanging needs and goals of their food hub, Robbi needed a platform that provided an expandable model with contractible options, without the hassle and a lot of extra costs. LFM was an ideal choice for Alaska Food Hub, offering flexible packages customizable to meet the diverse needs of food hubs, farmers, markets, and CSAs. The combination of  LFM features and the ability to tap into the LFM team’s extensive knowledge, relationships and experience made the choice easy for the Alaska Food Hub.

More specific features the Alaska Food Hub needed that LFM provides in a software platform are:

• • The ability to add multiple distribution and aggregation locations to suit multiple distribution days and ordering windows.
  • The ability to adjust and automate ordering windows, aggregation days, and distribution information for customers and producers.
  • According to Robbi, the Alaska Food Hub needed “a lot of hand holding at set up.”  

Something unique to the LFM platform that Robbi loves is the robust training materials for both site managers, admins, and producers. LFM provides a clear onboarding experience with training sessions, manuals, check lists, an assigned account point-person, and one-on-one sessions available to get you started. Furthermore, support does not stop after onboarding: LFM provides continuous support through phone, e-mail, and web meetings available to all LFM customers. Unlike many platforms that charge extra fees or remove Support options after onboarding, the LFM Support Staff is known for their knowledge and assistance at no extra cost.

Additional Recommendations

Customer feedback and producer participation are necessary for starting and growing a successful food hub. Robbi suggests sending surveys to your customers and producers to get specific feedback. Sites like SurveyMonkey and Mailchimp provide free to low-cost marketing services for creating, sending, and collecting surveys. Now with LFM’s Mailchimp Integration, you can easily sync your LFM customer data with your Mailchimp account to send campaigns and surveys to your customers.

The last piece of advice Robbi offers to new food hubs is holding post season meetings with producers and customers to give them a voice and help make changes to what isn’t working. Listening to your producers and customers can give you corrections and ideas you may have never considered before. The LFM platform is constantly updating features and adding new functionality based on LFM customer conversations.

We hope you found this interview with Robbi Mixon, Local Food Director for Alaska Food Hub, to be a valuable resource for starting and managing a food hub. Stay tuned to our blog for the next installment in our series focusing on stories of successful food hubs!

The post Food Hub Success: Key Advice from Alaska Food Hub first appeared on Local Food Marketplace.

Despite this boom, many tech companies fail to support their producers and customers. Instead, many platforms want to “disrupt” the market to increase their revenue while leaving their farmers with inaccessible data and a lack of support.

The way we buy and sell food has changed dramatically, but since 2009, Local Food Marketplace has “been working behind the scenes to help farmers grow their sales by making local food easier to find and purchase in their own communities”. In an industry that prides itself on “disrupting” the market, we’ve prided ourselves on taking a much different approach – inclusiveness.

Recently, LFM CEO and Co-Founder, Amy McCann, had the opportunity to speak with the North American Food Systems Network. Recognized as a food systems innovator, Amy explains how and why the Local Food Marketplace platform is different than all of the other local food platforms.

Read how Amy McCann, CEO of LFM, is simultaneously leading the charge while taking the path less travelled.

The post Who We Are: A Different Kind of Tech Company first appeared on Local Food Marketplace.

A few weeks ago, Local Food Marketplace launched a brand new Mailchimp Integration, included with most packages. While it’s still a brand new feature, farms and food hubs have eagerly been adapting it, seeing an increase in sales almost immediately. 

Rebecca Williams from LFM customer  Market-to-Go at Grow Oak Ridge in Tennessee says “sales are higher than ever before”. She goes on to say “I’m using the MailChimp integration to help keep my customer list segmented and target each group differently every week”.

In addition to saving time each week in syncing marketing email lists, she’s also excited about the marketing possibilities it presents such as utilizing different fields to create new and additional targeted campaigns to boost sales further. She’s on the right track. Our Mailchimp integration opens up a streamlined approach to marketing.

Here are some impactful ways to utilize the feature:

• • Welcome New Customers you can easily set up Mailchimp automations and journeys to send automated email campaigns for new subscribers to your newsletter and your new customers.
  • Ordering Open alerts: send scheduled Mailchimp emails to your customers for when ordering windows open. You can use the contact data from our integration to tag contacts and create segments for effortless shopping campaigns.
  • Weekly Specials: create embeddable content for featured products and custom shopping lists to include in your weekly email campaigns. Keep your customers engaged and excited for new products or sales!
  • Win-Back Campaigns: want to contact customers who have never ordered or haven’t ordered in 6+ months? Now that you can easily sort and organize lost customers, you can create specific Mailchimp campaigns to re-engage those customers. According to marketing firm Randall Reilly, “A lost customer or a lead that has fallen through still holds significant value. Because you have a 20 – 40% chance of selling to lost customers, compared to a 5 – 20% chance of selling to new prospects…”

Another feature Rebecca is utilizing is the Featured Products list and said “sales of these have been strong”. This feature enables hubs to directly market specific products to specific customer groups with beautiful newsletter content that clicks through right to your online LFM storefront.

Want to learn more about how the LFM custom Mailchimp integration can help you increase marketing effectiveness? Schedule a free consultation with us!

The post Higher Than Ever Sales: Market-to-Go at Grow Oak Ridge first appeared on Local Food Marketplace.

According to the Houston Chronicle, “Approximately 97 percent of businesses are using email marketing to try to convert email recipients into buyers. It must be working because, according to a Smith-Harmon survey, 76 percent of subscribers have made purchases from an email marketing message.”

Robust Contact Data & Syncing

As with all LFM features, our Mailchimp Integration is far more than a data dump. Not only do you get contact information from your LFM account, it also includes other custom fields that we track in our database that are crucial for targeted marketing purposes! When we say it’s not just a data dump, we mean it. Once you sync your LFM account with your Mailchimp account, you can easily create and manage contacts and associated data with the specific contacts to make it as useful as possible. Quickly and efficiently create tags, segments, and groups in Mailchimp using LFM contact data like first and last order dates, active vs inactive CSA subscribers, delivery routes, locations, customer types, and so much more! Additionally, you can see customer’s Mailchimp open rates directly from their LFM profile, for even more granular marketing data.

Our Mailchimp integration opens up a streamlined approach to your LFM marketing. Here are some impactful ways to utilize the feature:

• • Welcome New Subscribers: you can easily setup Mailchimp automations and journeys to send automated e-mail campaigns for new subscribers to your newsletter and your new customers.
  • Ordering Open alerts: send scheduled Mailchimp emails to your customers for when ordering windows open. You can use the contact data from our integration to tag contacts and create segments for effortless shopping campaigns.
  • Weekly Specials: create embeddable content for featured products and custom shopping lists to include in your weekly email campaigns. Keep your customers engaged and excited for new products or sales!
  • Win-Back Campaigns: want to contact customers who have never ordered or haven’t ordered in 6+ months? Now that you can easily sort and organize lost customers, you can create specific Mailchimp campaigns to re-engage those customers. According to marketing firm Randall Reilly, “A lost customer or a lead that has fallen through still holds significant value. Because you have a 20 – 40% chance of selling to lost customers, compared to a 5 – 20% chance of selling to new prospects…”

Looking for more strategies? Check out our complete Email Marketing Toolkit.

Embeddable Custom Shopping Lists & Featured Products

The LFM & Mailchimp Integration is not just a streamlined contact data sync, we also offer embeddable custom product shopping lists and featured products meant for your Mailchimp campaign content! Now you can directly market specific products to specific customer groups with beautiful newsletter content that clicks through right to your online LFM storefront.

Additional Marketing Resources

Consistent, quality marketing is essential for successful businesses, especially online markets. Our new Mailchimp Integration provides a streamlined, in-depth customer database for you to promote your marketplace. If you’re looking for more information on how to increase sales and marketing for farms, foodhubs, farmers markets, and CSAs, check out our recent blog posts:

• • How Quality Photos Drive Sales
  • Social Media Strategies to Maximize your Online Store
  • How to use Press Releases to Promote your Online Store

Keep an eye out for more new features and marketing tips on the blog from LFM! 

*Resources: 
Boykin, Theresa. “5 Ways to Win Back Lost Customers.” Randall Reilly, 2020, https://www.randallreilly.com/5-ways-to-win-back-lost-customers/
Lorette, Kristie. “The Effect of Email Marketing on Consumer Behaviour.” The Houston Chronicle, https://smallbusiness.chron.com/email-marketing-pitfalls-42956.html

The post LFM & Mailchimp: New Integration for Powerful Marketing first appeared on Local Food Marketplace.

Online sales through Local Food Marketplace increase your products’ accessibility, offer convenience to your customers, and develop key marketing touch points that you otherwise would not have – but you need to harness these opportunities to get the most out of them.

We teamed up with Taste the Local Difference (TLD) for a four-part series focused on quick, easy, and impactful marketing resources for farmers, food hubs, and markets! Taste the Local Difference specializes in marketing local food and to help amplify their efforts. TLD represents thousands of local food businesses across the value chain, and they all have one thing in common: limited time and resources.

Part 3: Use Pictures Worth Clicking

At the farmers market we can taste the peppery bite of an arugula leaf, smell the aroma of freshly baked bread, test the ripeness of a peach with a gentle squeeze, and hear—often directly from the producer—the story of how their food was grown or made. We shop with our senses, and when we shop online those senses are limited. When you can’t rely on a free sample or a friendly chat to make the sale, product photos are the next best thing. Quality images reach through the screen and spark a sensory response, helping your customers imagine just how good your products taste, smell, and feel.

In Part 2 of our TLD series, we discussed social media strategies to maximize your online store. An impactful practice for your online store and social media is the use of high quality, clear images to highlight your product and marketplace. Social media is an excellent tool for driving traffic to your online store, too! Now that you have the traffic, how do you convert this to sales?

Use these tips and tools to represent your brand online with high-impact photos that help drive sales.

Add an image for every product

Online items without a photo are usually matched with a logo, low-quality stock image, or just a blank space. These placeholders look generic and skippable, and do nothing to entice customers. Great photos capture customers’ attention and help differentiate your products. While it’s tempting to assume that customers know what they want and don’t need photos to help them shop (Everyone has seen a carrot. Do I really need to add a picture?), remember that in an online marketplace your pictures are your packaging. Think about how much goes into making products stand out on grocery store shelves or farmers market displays. Well-styled, high-quality images are the key to standing out online.

Customize your product photos

One way to quickly build a customized image library is to hire a photographer. For about $300/hour an experienced food photographer will capture images of your products styled in ways that emphasize your brand. Share inspiration photos, branding guidelines, or key words (e.g., fresh-picked, handmade, heirloom) to help the photographer understand as much as possible about your business and your vision for the photos. Ask for links to their portfolio and published work to get a sense of their style.

If the $300/hour rate feels out of reach, consider organizing a full day shoot for multiple vendors. The photographer may offer a day rate (which is often a better deal than an hourly rate), and you can offer time slots for other local businesses to sign up and get their products professionally photographed. Charge a fee for each participating business and use those funds to cover your costs.

Another added benefit for having professional photographs of your products and vendors is the ability to reuse these photos for different purposes. In part 1 of our TLD series, we discussed how to use press releases to promote your online store. News outlets love a good photo opportunity, so providing a professional, licensed photograph with your press release is a sure fire way to get your story out there.

If you’re using a stock photo, make it a good one

If paying a photographer is out of reach or you need high-quality placeholders while you’re waiting on a photoshoot, browse an image bank. Unsplash offers thousands of high resolution photos contributed by photographers all over the world. Their photos are free to download and use to market your business. When searching for images, keep in mind that effective product photos have:

• Good variation in color
• Aren’t too busy or cluttered
• Make it clear what the product is

Taste the Local Difference offers a library of high quality photos

In a large image bank it can take some digging and a critical eye to find appropriate photos to represent your products. And if you’re selling unique produce varieties, you might be out of luck. A search for “purple carrot” in Unsplash yields plenty of photos, but only 3 feature the root vegetable. The Taste the Local Difference image library comprises over 75 high-quality photos shot specifically for use in Local Food Marketplace. For $100 you can access the full image catalog and set high-quality photos as the default image for your fruit and vegetable products.

We hope these tools and tips empower you to choose the best images to represent your brand and help you build a more beautiful online store!

Let us know how it goes, and keep an eye out for more marketing tips on the blog from TLD! You can gain access to 1:1 support and customized marketing strategies from Taste the Local Difference here.

The post How Quality Photos Drive Sales first appeared on Local Food Marketplace.