Progress 09/01/21 to 10/15/23
Outputs
Target Audience:- Small to mid-scale food producers seeking to sell their products locally or regionally. - Consumers interested in purchasing directly from local producers. - Wholesale buyers, including institutions, restaurants and local intermediaries interested in purchasing from local and regional producers. - Local food stakeholders interested in facilitating transactions between producers and local / regional buyers. Changes/Problems:
Nothing Reported
What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?
Nothing Reported
How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?We attended the 2021 and 2022 National Agricultural Marketing Summits. In 2021 and 2022 our session was as follows: Title: Creating functional online marketing and sales networks Abstract: This session will discuss opportunities and provide examples of how agricultural producers are using the internet to market, sell and donate their products. Recognizing that the internet is one of many possible sales channels used by producers, we will describe how producers are using the internet to their advantage. We will go into detail on how producers can gain marketing visibility to buyers online, how online technologies can increase operating efficiencies, and ways producers can obtain price premiums for specialty agriculture products through online marketing. We also attended, presented and demonstrated the technology platform at new and beginning farmer virtual events hosted by organizations engaged with new and beginning farmers. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?
Nothing Reported
Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals?
Our SBIR Phase II project had and continues to have a positive impact on rural producers, local food intermediaries, consumers and local wholesale buyers by creating an efficient and low-cost method of transacting between producers and buyers of local food. In excess of $1,260,000 of local food was purchased via credit card and approximately another $150,000 marked for offline payment during the Phase II project period. By the end of the project, 1,700 small to midscale producers, in all 50 states plus Washington DC, had created selling accounts. Over 9,000 consumers and 73 wholesale buyers purchased from these producers. Additionally, 13 intermediaries created online marketplaces where consumers could buy directly from multiple local producers in a single order. The product of this SBIR project, a local food marketing and sales technology platform, is innovative because it lowered barriers to ecommerce for local food producers and intermediaries. Importantly, this project greatly reduced the cost barrier for producers engaging in ecommerce and in person credit card transactions. Producers use the technology at no cost while buyers pay a small transaction fee. Additionally, the technology platform uniquely enables producers to transact through multiple channels, all while managing product prices, inventory and availability in a single account. Specifically, producers setup a free Food4All selling account and add products that can be sold through their own branded online retail store, online wholesale store, online marketplaces, as well as in-person. The ability for producers to manage inventory for a product through all of these channels critically prevents them from overselling in any given channel. To date, no other platform enables this level of control over inventory for products sold across multiple channels. Producers and intermediaries are also able to setup and manage logistics for products sold, including pick up, delivery and shipping. We successfully met our first objective, which was to build upon the Phase I prototype to develop a scalable platform that meets the needs of rural food producers selling to wholesale buyers and direct to consumers. To accomplish this objective, we updated the data model to attach different attributes important to consumers, intermediaries and wholesale buyers. Another major task we completed was to improve buyer's ability find and buy from producers by adding a searchable national map to our website: https://www.food4all.com/national-map/. Buyers can easily find and buy online from producers in their local area. We improved the buyer's experience by updating the layout of retail, wholesale and marketplace stores to enable producers to better communicate important information, highlight featured products, and categorize products. Buyers can quickly filter goods based on categories, search and purchase their desired products. We made progress on enabling buyers using MarketMaker's Buy/Sell Forum to quickly find and buy products of interest. MarketMaker producers with Food4All accounts are able to create "ads" within the Buy/Sell forum for single products. When a buyer selects the ad and wishes to proceed to purchase, they are taken to the Single Product Page within Food4All where they can add the item to their shopping cart and complete their purchase. Another major task was to enhance our platform in order to scale for volume. To that end, we researched and implemented Amazon Web Services (AWS)'s Well-Architected Framework (WAFR) principles. WAFR describes key concepts, design principles, and architectural best practices for designing and running workloads in the cloud. The AWS WAFR is made up of six pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability. The Food4All back-end was designed to meet the requirements outlined in each pillar of the WAFR. We also added key features to enhance the logistics options for moving food from producer to buyer. Specifically, we integrated with ShipEngine in order to enable producers to identify shippable products that have a perishable window for shipping and may be packed in dry ice. Integrating with ShipEngine provides a discount of 40-60% off of retail prices for UPS and USPS shipments. We also enabled producers to charge by the mile for delivery. We also set up the ability for producers to determine a delivery radius, which is reinforced in the shopping cart. In an effort to explore additional logistics option to move product from producer to buyer, we conducted research on integrating with national third-party delivery platforms, the likes of UBER and Door Dash. We encountered limitations of partnering with this type of third-party logistics provider fundamentally because these businesses are focused on moving food within high density areas. Our second objective was to demonstrate the integration of Food4All's wholesale and direct-to-consumer platform with MarketMaker and procurement technologies used by distributors, grocery stores and other institutional buyers. As discussed above, we successfully integrated the Food4All platform with MarketMaker's Buy/Sell Forum to facilitate producers ability to quickly post available product and for buyers to find and buy the product. We also held discussions with a fresh food procurement platform used by grocery store chains and institutional buyers to discuss integrating Food4All's "product catalog" into the procurement system. This opportunity could be promising in the future, but would require a more focused outreach and onboarding of mid to larger scale producers in an area that overlaps with the use of a specific fresh food procurement system. Our third objective was to demonstrate the functionality of a Food4All regulatory and reporting software framework. For this objective, we developed a Business Intelligence Framework using Google Charts, a powerful interactive Web service that creates graphical charts from our platform's transactional data. We created a Producer Dashboard graphically displaying sales, product and customer information when they initially log into their Food4All account. At a glance, producers are able to see their weekly gross and net sales volumes, best-selling products, best customers, and top products purchased by high volume customers. This data is manipulatable and dynamically refreshed based on current activity. In summary, we successfully met the objectives of this SBIR Phase II project in a way that will have long term meaningful impact on our key target audience - rural producers seeking to sell direct to their local community. A few quotes from our customers demonstrates the impact of this project on their operations: Jane Tymrak of Loberau Legacy Farm, a goat and dairy farmer in Texas said "My favorite thing about Food4All is their passion and commitment to the Farmer...Food4All's main focus is getting the farmer online, getting their products out there and having satisfied customers. Food4All has boosted our overall farm sales by allowing us to offer our products in a much more broad area. We are able to reach a lot more people. We expect to almost double in sales in the next year. " Alison Holland Rainshadow Organics, CSA manager of a full diet farm in Oregon said "The platform is built with farmers in mind. The platform creates the ability for...our customers... to more easily purchase from us...and the backend of Food4All makes my life easier because I have access to the data that I need." Lorrie Dahlen, Marshfield Farmers Market Manager and Summer Dreams Farm proprietor in Massachusetts said " I worked with three different companies that offered virtual type marketplaces - and Food4All came out on top. Fees are lower, they offer more flexibility...they offer better reports especially when it comes to paying vendors (for offline transactions). It's just simple. Food4All just makes it easy."
Publications
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