The Food Roots FarmTable storefront strives to bring fresh, local food to you, our customers. But it also serves to provide market access to the food producers in our region. Our new FarmTable Online Marketplace will not only make it easier for you to shop local; it will also support the more than 30 farmers, fishers, ranchers, and other food producers who bring you such delicious food.
Through our new online marketplace, you’ll pre-order your groceries. This gives your farmers time to go out and harvest your produce to order, which means your vegetables will be fresher than ever! Farmers benefit by only bringing in produce with a guaranteed buyer, which means less produce going bad in the cooler.
Every hour spent off-farm is expensive for our producers! We’ve streamlined our ordering and pickup windows to coordinate with regularly scheduled deliveries, so our producers can focus more time and energy on food production.
Moving our marketplace online lets us offer robust reporting to all our participating vendors. This means they get more information about what you, their customers, like most! These details can inform their crop plans in future years, making sure to bring you more of what you love and less of what you don’t.
The online marketplace will allow producers to gauge customer interest in new and different items without having to physically deliver them to the storefront. This means more opportunities for new and exciting products coming your way!
We’ll be making everything in our store available online for purchase. That means that smaller producers and those who sell non-essential food items will still have an opportunity to sell their products to you, keeping their small businesses running.
Transitioning to online sales will also allow Food Roots staff to save hours of work taking and fulfilling phone orders; we’ll use that time to grow our programs, recruit new producers to sell with FarmTable, and provide you with an ever-increasing selection of North Coast food products!
We’ll be launching our online marketplace on Tuesday, July 14th at 5 pm! Customers have until Saturday, July 18th at midnight to place their orders. Pickup of those orders is 12-5:30 pm on Tuesday July 21st. Those using SNAP benefits or FDNP checks can reserve their orders online, and can pay at pickup or over the phone. We’ll do our best to accommodate phone orders on a more limited basis for customers without internet access.
When you purchase food from FarmTable, you are not only providing your family with fresh and healthful food; you are also supporting the livelihoods of your neighbors. You’re honoring the heritage of food production in our region, and making possible a future that supports local foods and local farms.