About the Concept

Farm Fresh Foods vision is to provide an online shopping app and website that Farmers Markets can use to offer convenient online shopping for their vendors.

Our intention is to combine existing Farmers Market infrastructure with an easy to use online platform to make farm fresh foods accessible to individuals who are interested in local and organic foods and already use online shopping, but who do not currently shop at a Farmers Market.

How We Got Started

In Early 2018, Farmers Market of the Ozarks submitted a request to Hack 4 Good Springfield, asking them to consider building an online store for their Farmers Market during the H4G annual weekend community coding hackathon.

Jason Klein, a volunteer co-organizer for Hack 4 Good Springfield, received their request and began researching existing options. Surprised to find there was not an existing turn-key system for Farmers Markets, Jason prepared a project proposal and presented the project to the Hack 4 Good organizing committee. Although the project was not selected, Jason remained very interested in pursuing this concept.

Jason had another opportunity to pursue the Farmers Market online store concept at Startup Weekend Springfield 2019, so he spent additional time researching the concept and preparing a pitch. His “Farm Fresh Foods” pitch deck (PDF) described a modern online shopping platform for existing Farmers Markets.

Harrison Schott was quick to join the Farm Fresh Foods team and helped with overall strategy as well as research and preparing the team presentation he delivered to judges on Sunday (02/10/2019).

Michael Park also joined the Farm Fresh Foods team on Friday night and helped with research at the Farmers Market on Saturday morning, before switching to another team who had lost one of their key members due to a family emergency.

Our team spent considerable time on research during Startup Weekend:

We researched existing local food programs including Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), farmers market online shopping systems that no longer exist, farmers market online shopping systems that are outdated and do not offer online payments, grocery online shopping pickup/delivery systems.

We interviewed the market manager and vendors at Farmers Market of the Ozarks to learn more about their needs and potential roadblocks. We also spoke with individual consumers before building an online survey. We purposely decided not to interview consumers at the Farmers Market since they are not the intended audience and would be likely to provide biased responses.

We surveyed dozens of individual grocery consumers in Missouri and Kansas, learning that 50% already shop for groceries online and most would be interested in shopping at a Farmers Market if convenience and/or cost barriers were reduced.

Current Status

Startup Weekend Springfield judges awarded their first place honor to Jason Klein and Harrison Schott for the “Farm Fresh Foods” concept. Startup Weekend does not offer cash prizes, but this validation does provide additional opportunities for Jason and Harrison to pursue the concept.

We are continuing to collaborate on this concept. There are several ways you can get involved:

Please take our Consumer Grocery Survey (if you haven’t already) so we can better understand current consumer expectations and needs.

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