Does your food hub need software to coordinate and manage product availability from multiple producers, scale up operations, and meet buyer demand? Explore Local Food Marketplace (LFM), the platform built specifically with food hubs in mind. We have powerful tools to help hubs improve their online presence and streamline business operations — both of which are key to profitability. 

Here are seven reasons your food hub needs LFM for online sales. Want to learn more? Schedule a demo with our team so we can walk you through all of our features.

1. Sell to All Customers (Grocery Stores, Restaurants, CSAs, Schools, Etc.) from One Platform

Do you find yourself in QuickBooks for wholesale invoices, Square (or a similar platform) for retail orders, and spreadsheets for your CSA customers? Are you switching back and forth between systems to assemble availability lists for buyers or consolidate what needs to be ordered from producers? Do you spend hours each week updating price lists for your various customers?

With LFM, you don’t have to do any of this! LFM is one system for all things local food. Create custom price lists, custom product lists, pack and pick lists, invoices, and much more from the same system. Doing all of these tasks from one platform means fewer mistakes and much less time spent on administrative tasks.

Because we serve so many different types of retail and wholesale customers … we thought that we couldn’t sell online because of the unique pricing for those channels. Because LFM offers the ability to set multiple price levels, we can literally sell one product for a hundred different prices if we want to.”

—Blue Sky Organic Farms 

2. Make Working with Producers a Snap (and Make Their Job Easier!)

Are you calling producers to gather information on product availability and pricing every week? Do they have to submit that information through a form or email — leaving you to consolidate the information into multiple lists for buyers?

With LFM, producers use Connect, an easy-to-use (but powerful) producer application. With Connect, farmers can:

• Enter their products and pack sizes and update their pricing every week.
• Upload photos and write a product description designed to entice customers to purchase their food.
• Print labels so everything is well organized when it arrives to you.

 

In addition to selling to your hub, farmers can use Connect to manage their sales for other channels (like farmers markets) — a real selling point to partnering with you! Tools for growers include the ability to:

• Consolidate and automate their harvest, pick, and pack lists.
• Enter lot details for traceability and food safety requirements.
• Upload insurance and other required documents.
• See a detailed accounting of what they have sold and been paid for.

The ability for producers to add their own information saves you time, and so do our communication tools. Automate and send pick lists (no need to consolidate and add up orders!), reminders to list products, and other information farmers need to know.

From the automated pick list going out the door to the ability to just send a message to all the producers, we don’t need to add anything to the equation. LFM’s system handles the communication piece really well for us.”

—Delivered Fresh

3. Automate Communication with Customers

Keeping customers fully informed is no small feat! LFM has built comprehensive communication templates and systems to keep everyone in the loop. Customers are busy, so we support email and SMS communication directly through the platform, as well as an integration with Mailchimp for marketing emails.

Here are some of the messages you can send straight from LFM:

• Schedule or bulk send invoices, order confirmations, “what’s in the box” emails for CSA customers, and delivery or pickup reminders.
• Send updates at once to all affected customers when you have a delivery delay, product shortage, or need to replace an item because of a crop failure or other problem.
• Sync your contact information (as well as key account details) with Mailchimp to create custom marketing journeys for new and existing customers interested in CSAs, wholesale sales, farm-to-table purchasing, or any other sales channels you offer.

 

4. A Full Set of Tools to Increase Sales

At LFM, we are all about helping you grow your business and strengthen local food systems. Our software platform has a full arsenal of tools designed to help you increase sales. Here are some of the tools our customers find the most helpful:

• An attractive, easy-to-shop storefront with pictures, product descriptions, and product attributes (such as certified organic or gluten-free).
• Create unlimited price lists and custom product lists, which allow you to tailor information for each individual buyer or group of buyers.
• Product subscriptions, which make it easy for customers to purchase staples every week without any extra effort.
• Allow customers to save favorite or frequently purchased items for easy shopping.
• Redeem coupons and gift certificates straight from the storefront.
• The ability to accept Online SNAP.
• Bundles, which are groups of products offered to your customers as a single purchase on the storefront. Use this feature to create meal kits, imperfect produce boxes, a box for a holiday or special occasion, a one-time CSA box, or something fun like a pizza-making kit.
• Customizable CSAs, a popular option with consumers. Allow them to swap out items or add additional items to their order.

 

5. A Solution That Will Grow with You

As your business grows and changes, you don’t want to switch software providers or find another plug-in or app every time you need a new feature. LFM is the software platform that grows with you! Here are some of the features that growing food hubs love to access as they get bigger or add new services:

• Advanced Inventory Management: Manage your warehouse inventory with reorder levels, create purchase orders, track receipts and shrink, and meet traceability requirements for food safety certifications.
• Advanced Packing and Logistics: Optimize packing order within a CSA box, pack by route, configure (and optimize) delivery routes, get delivery status updates, collect delivery signatures, and send updated invoices.
• Local Food Network: If you progress to working in partnership with several food hubs, create a shared availability list and automate transactions between hubs while keeping your producers in the loop.
• Alias sites: Easily set up multiple brands (or different customer-facing sites) for your hub. With LFM, you can set up several storefronts from the same admin backend — simplifying your accounting, data collection, and much more.

 

6. Access Better Data and Reports

Just like healthy soil is necessary for productive yields, robust reporting is necessary for a strong business. Our insightful sales data can help you manage your business KPIs for delivery routes, customer types, average order size, and more. If your organization receives grants, LFM can easily pull up the data you need for funder reports.

You can also quickly access your data with our robust filters. They make it simple to sort information by region or location, customer, customer type, product, or other parameters. Customers and producers can access their own reports directly.

Since we’re a nonprofit, we need figures and stats. We don’t only need to know how the CSA is doing at the end of the year, but how it’s doing in the middle of the year, or the first month, or a random week in July. We need this data for outside reporting, so it’s a great function to be able to easily compile all the data reports to see how we’re selling and what we’re selling. It tells us more about why we’re selling when we can look at the data from the past not only months, but years.”

—Dreaming Out Loud 

7. Receive Robust Onboarding, Technical Support, and Technical Assistance

We know that any change to software and other business systems is stressful. With LFM, you receive hands-on guidance tailored to your needs. Our team is staffed by food hub veterans and tech professionals who really understand food hub operations and the challenges of local food systems.

Once you sign on with LFM, you will receive a comprehensive onboarding designed to teach you everything you need to know to run your storefront successfully.

Businesses change over time, which means you may need to adopt new features or adjust how you’re using the platfom. We’ve designed our customer success packages to ensure you get dedicated, one-on-one assistance and advice as your business evolves and changes. Learn more about customer success packages here.

What I really appreciate about LFM is the communication. We’ve had such a positive experience thanks to the people. We’ve had a partner with Amy and the team, not just a contract with a software company.”

—Food Hub Customer 

Contact Us to Learn More

Do you need more reasons to consider Local Food Marketplace? We’d love to talk to you! Schedule a one-on-one demo with our team today.

In addition, check out these blog posts to learn more about how we work with customers.

• Blue Sky Organic Farms calls LFM “one platform for everything local food.” Check out why LFM was their choice for handling sales to the many different customers they serve.
• LFM helped Delivered Fresh cut time on the pack line by 40%! Learn how they did it in this blog post.
• Dreaming Out Loud has used LFM to solve multiple challenging, including how to publicize a new CSA program online for faster adoption and how to simplify grant reporting.
• When Rosebird Farm added the ability to take Online SNAP, they saw the value of their online orders from SNAP customers more than double. Check out their inspiring story here.
• Yellowstone Valley Food Hub has used LFM’s Bundles feature to offer fun new products to customers, decrease decision fatigue, and give their producers a way to sell more products.