Selling Online the Smart Way: An Interview with the Troy Waterfront Farmers Market (Local Food Marketplace)
This interview by Amy McCann was published by Local Food Marketplace on June 30, 2020.
Above: the interview as published on Local Food Marketplace’s website, June 30, 2020. Click to enlarge.
Market manager Steve Ridler talks about how the market grew from 10 to 20 vendors in a small waterfront parking lot to about 110 vendors, open year-round, drawing 12,000 to 18,000 people on a Saturday before COVID-19. When the county health department wouldn’t let a market that size stay open in spring 2020, the market launched an online store with pickup. Ridler says it signed up more than 3,500 users and took 225 orders in its first week, grew from 30 to about 45 vendors, and set up its order hub in cold storage space borrowed from a local restaurant wholesaler. The reopened in-person market was much smaller, at 600 to 700 customers on a Saturday. He also offers advice to other market managers on planning for aggregation and storage.
Local Food Marketplace is the company whose online-sales software the market used, and this interview ran on its company blog as a customer story. It reads partly as a promotion for the platform, and Ridler explains why the market chose it.
“It was the ability to showcase all our producers on one site.”
— Steve Ridler, market manager, to Local Food Marketplace
Read the full interview at Local Food Marketplace.