Food and local produce · Local produce discovery marketplace
Farmers Market Haul: an app to find local markets and what is in stock
Farmers Market Haul helps shoppers find local farmers markets and see what each vendor is selling this week. We built the app, where vendors post their stock from a phone in under 2 minutes. In the first eighteen months it listed 410 markets and 6,200 vendors, vendor sales rose 22% on average for stalls with a live stock list, and 94,000 shoppers used it to plan trips. We built it in 6 weeks.
- Client
- Farmers Market Haul
- Industry
- Food and local produce
- Built
- Mobile app
- Timeframe
- 6 weeks
What changed
- 410 marketsAnd 6,200 vendors listed in the first eighteen months.
- +22% vendor salesAverage lift for vendors who keep a live stock list.
- +31% footfallIncrease at markets with a complete profile.
- 94,000 shoppersPeople using the app to plan a market trip.
- Under 2 minutesTime for a vendor to post the week's stock from a phone at the stall.
- 6 weeksTime to build.
Results as reported for this build after launch.
The challenge
Local farmers markets had almost no presence online. Shoppers struggled to find markets or know what vendors were offering, which held back vendor sales and made local produce harder to buy.
Online, farmers markets barely exist. Most have no website, and the ones that do tend to show an address and opening hours last correct in 2019. Nobody publishes which vendors are trading this week or what they are bringing.
Our client had run a market stall for years and saw the damage from both sides. Shoppers turned up expecting strawberries in April. Vendors carried produce home unsold because the people who wanted it never knew it was there. Both sides decided the market was unreliable, and that belief made it so.
The hardest constraint was data entry. A vendor behind a table at seven in the morning will not fill in a product catalogue. If posting took more than a couple of minutes on a phone it would be ignored, and a stale listing is worse than no listing.
What we built
We built a discovery and ordering app that links shoppers directly with local growers. Markets become visible, vendors get more chances to sell, and buying local produce becomes a simple plan instead of a gamble.
Operator-run market profiles
Each market lists trading days, seasonal schedule, parking, payment methods and whether dogs are allowed, kept current by the market operator.
Two-minute vendor stock posts
Vendors photograph the stall or tap a few items from a saved list and it goes live. It is built to be done standing up, one-handed, in about two minutes.
Search by produce
Shoppers search for what they want to buy, not for a market, and see who has it this weekend.
Follows and stock alerts
Following a vendor or a market sends an alert whenever new stock is posted.
Seasonal availability guides
Guides explain what is actually in season locally, which tackles the strawberries-in-April expectation at its source.
Pre-order and operator dashboard
Vendors who want it can offer pre-order and collection. Market operators get a dashboard showing which stalls are posting and which are not.
Screens and design system
The result
The 22% sales lift for vendors follows posting frequency almost exactly. That gave market operators a concrete reason to get stalls onto the app, instead of a vague request to modernise.
Several markets now run stall allocation and waiting lists through the vendor dashboard. It was not designed for that, and it is now the feature operators ask about first.
