LFM handles all the basics of online sales, plus all the little things.

You aren’t just selling online. You’re also: Tracking EBT sales, creating pack lists and labels, managing the inventory in your warehouse, keeping track of info for certifications, paying producers, sending out emails to customers, and more.

LFM is a platform that does all the little things, making online sales easy for you AND your customer. So you can focus on growing your business.

Schedule your free Demo!

So what are the features that make LFM different?

LFM was built to power local food sales, and we are dedicated to providing flexible, proven solutions to real problems for local businesses.

• A simple customer interface that matches your website and branding. Your brand should shine through—we’re here to support you.
• A customized experience for all of your customer types. Chances are you offer different payment terms, payment options, pricing, or delivery options for your different customers. LFM allows you to customize the online experience so that customers won’t have to guess what products or options are available to them.
• A single point of inventory. Whether you’re putting bunches of carrots in your CSA boxes or selling cases to the local grocery store, you can sell all of them from the same shared inventory.
• Unlimited price levels. When you’re selling to multiple customers, your software shouldn’t limit you to one price level. With LFM you can set as many price levels as you need.
• Comprehensive subscription options: LFM supports many different CSA models (prepaid or pay by delivery) and gives you the accounting tools to keep track.
• Full-system inventory management: While most online sales platforms just look at current availability, LFM is a full system. Save time by using LFM to keep track of all the products coming in and out of your physical inventory—and save time on reporting later.

• Connect with producers: LFM has always helped food hubs automate communication with producers, and our new app Local Food Connect allows your farmers and producers to manage their own inventory and sales. Not just to your hub, but to other markets as well.
• Generate harvest and pack Lists: Once you have an order, you should never need to waste time re-entering that data for any reason. With LFM, you can print harvest and pack lists, as well as customer invoices, with the click of a button. Skip the time on your laptop and get to harvesting and selling.
• Square terminal integration & POS: Our Square terminal integration along with our simple POS features make it easy to take credit card payments in person while keeping track of inventory.
• Cost effective: Unlike other platforms, LFM has no percentage of sales or transaction fees that punish growth.
• A scalable platform: Whether you’re just starting out or have been in operations for years, LFM is designed for local businesses. Saving time on administrative tasks only becomes more important as your sales increase. Our platform can grow with you, and there are no transaction fees to punish growth.
• Our team: We aren’t just some faceless tech company; Our team is staffed with food hub veterans and tech professionals that understand farm and food hub operations, software technology, as well as the challenges of local food systems. We form real, lasting relationships with our customers.

And we’re always here to help. Customer feedback and relationships are at the core of our success. Read below to hear from some of our current customers:

I have personally sent dozens of businesses to LFM. I think that it’s the right tool for the job! It has all the capabilities that you need. Once you invest the time to get it set up – it can honestly save you ten to twenty hours of manual work every week.

–Caroline Pam of The Kitchen Garden Farm

Read more: From a Farm to a Collective: An Interview with Sunderland Farm Collaborative – Local Food Marketplace

For a while I was trying to build my own thing using Google Forms, having it dump into a spreadsheet, but I needed more. I thought there wasn’t anything out there that could facilitate what we needed, until we contacted you! LFM was the only software out there that could do what we wanted: provide a customer interface, printable and automated invoices, a harvest list, labels, and more.

-Danya Teitelbaum, Queen’s Greens

Read more: Small Farm, Big Competition: An Interview with Queen’s Greens

Since implementing LFM, the online ordering system has saved us 16 to 18 hours per week. It’s definitely helped us scale up a whole lot quicker. We can just tell our new customers to create an online profile and then view all our products… It’s saved us a lot of time.

-Josh Montgomery of Profound Foods

Read more: Quadrupling Customers & Saving Time: An Interview with Profound Foods 

I'm in! Schedule a Demo Today.

The post Evaluating Online Sales Platforms: What Makes LFM Different 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.

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.