How We Did This: Farmstanding—an easier way to find and support local farmers, fishermen and (former) restaurant suppliers
My husband and I love to eat out. In more normal times, our weekend evenings include at least one dinner out. We often choose our travel destinations by food, and sometimes we’ll even pick weekend activities by their proximity to a restaurant we want to try.
Restaurants in Massachusetts closed on March 17, and by the beginning of April we were both feeling a bit down. My husband listens to a lot of food podcasts, and the news from the restaurant industry was beyond gloomy.
High-profile chefs like Tom Colicchio of Top Chef and Craft Restaurants are predicting that by the time we stop social distancing and go back to normal, over 80% of restaurants will have gone out of business.
That means the majority of chefs and restaurant owners are currently watching years of their energy, passion and dedication go up in smoke.
For those of us who love to eat, it means the dinner-out options waiting for us at the end of this COVID-19 tunnel will be few and far between. From mom-and-pop shops to fine dining, many of them will be bankrupt, along with tens of thousands of local farmers, fishermen and artisanal food suppliers who depended on restaurant orders.
Restaurants, Farmers and Fishermen are Struggling. What Can We Do?
Depressed yet? I was. Then we heard a discussion on David Chang’s podcast that gave me an idea, something I could do to potentially help.
Chang is currently running a series called “Too Small to Fail,” talking to chefs about the effects of COVID-19. Early in April, he hosted three-Michelin-starred chef Corey Lee of Benu who had this to say:
“I think we’re going to feel it first, then it’s just going to trickle down and basically disrupt this entire network that supports restaurants… These huge distributors that work with these products that we’re probably not used to working with are the ones that are going to be best-positioned to be able to operate fully when this thing’s over…
The small purveyors who find this one little product and you buy one thing from them—how are they going to survive? We have to do our part to give them the best chance.”
We decided the best thing we could do would be to start buying directly from these suppliers, the ones who used to sell to restaurants. No more $1 oysters at restaurants on a Friday? We’ll find the nearest oyster guy and buy from him. We’ll try to find local farms to get produce, meat and eggs, even if it costs more. We wanted to do the little we could to help.
It turns out that a lot of farmers, fishermen and small distributors have now started accepting retail orders. Once I started looking, I found a bunch of lists online. And a few spreadsheets. And some maps. And pretty soon it was too much information in too many different places to keep track of properly.
I just wanted a simple way to search for the kinds of food we wanted. I wanted to select pickup or delivery and get a list of farmers and fishermen delivering to my door or offering pickup within a few miles of my house.
Search for Pickup and Delivery from Local Farmers and Fishermen
I’m a software developer by trade, so by the beginning of my second day looking at COVID-19 food lists online, I had started building a searchable website called Farmstanding.com.
Farmstanding is free for everyone and it does the following:
Customers can search for delivery or safe pickup options nearby and find a list of local producers and suppliers, with contact and sales info.
Local growers/suppliers can be found in every location they currently serve by delivery OR pickup, even if it's just a popup for 1 week or a location that’s only open on specific days.
Farmers’ markets can link to their vendors to create a virtual market with 1-click access to current sales information. When open, they’ll also show up in searches as an extra pickup location for all of their vendors.
You can browse the map or view pages listing pickup/delivery options & resources in each state (although Massachusetts and New England are best-served so far).
The initial data was based on the COVID-19 lists, spreadsheets and maps that I found online, but any farmer, fisherman or local supplier can join and add their business.
After Farmstanding went live, the response I got from farmers was incredibly positive, and I realized how much of a need there is for this from both sides. Without restaurant buyers and with farmers’ markets closed in so many places, thousands of farmers are now struggling to sell high quality food.
At the same time, larger produce supply companies like Imperfect Foods and Misfits Market are back-ordered or completely sold out. (I know because we tried to do that before we started going direct.)
More and more of us want to buy better food or support our local farmers directly; we all just need an easier way to connect with them.
An Easier Way for Farmers to Reach New Customers
Farmstanding started as a tool to make it easier for people like me to buy local food right now, but it’s been changing rapidly as I get feedback from farmers and users.
The biggest change came when I got a message from an urban farmer in Dorchester. He was looking for a way to set up online pre-ordering for pickup so that he could serve his community safely this summer. He needed a way to automatically restrict the days when new orders would be accepted, and he needed to change the products every week as they come in and out of season.
By this time, I was two weeks into the Farmstanding project, so I had already realized this was a common issue. I’d found hundreds of farmers taking orders by text, phone, email and Facebook messages.
These methods work in the short term, but they quickly become time-consuming, hard to manage and confusing for customers as well. For our part, we ordered produce over the phone from one local spot that took my credit card number, but wasn’t able to tell me my total until the box arrived two days later!
It’s a common problem, because setting up an online shop requires either money or time and tech savvy. This means that the smallest operations are the most likely to be left behind.
Like Shopify, but Free and Built for Farmers and Local Producers
That’s why my next step was to add a free online ordering system for farmers and fishermen to use.
Based on discussions with Apolo and others, I extended Farmstanding to allow farmers to set up online shops serving the specific needs I was hearing about.
Now farmers can accept and manage orders online, set an ordering window to automatically open/close every week as needed, change inventory to reflect seasonality and set available pickup locations for customers to select from (all of which are searchable in Farmstanding).
Farmers and suppliers who couldn’t accept online orders before can now offer online ordering for free at their own dedicated online shop, making things easier for them and their customers.
Those farmers who already had online ordering can connect existing shops to Farmstanding and show a “Shop Now” button with a 1-step integration.
There’s one small catch of course, as with all free things: In order to offer free online order processing for farmers, the free Farmstanding shops don’t process any payments online.
However, given the ingenuity of the methods I’ve seen so far, this doesn’t seem to be an issue. Farmers coordinate payments directly—credit cards over the phone at pickup, direct payment apps and more—leaving all the details of inventory and order processing to the platform.
What’s the Future for Restaurants, Farmers and Suppliers?
Many people are still looking for the answer to how to save restaurants, but Farmstanding offers you a way to support their supply chain directly.
Buying locally helps ensure that high quality food will still be available when restaurants return, and that means more than joining CSAs, wonderful as they are. It means also supporting the farms and fisheries that don’t have the security of a CSA.
Many farms and restaurant suppliers aren’t currently set up with CSAs (or any way to sell direct to consumer), and these are the farms and fisheries that are most at risk of disappearing forever. If those of us who love food don’t continue to support these products while restaurants are closed, they might not be there at the end of this.
