New online ordering system brings local food products to your door
What if a farmers’ market came to you?
That’s the concept behind Local and Fresh, a new website that connects Saskatchewan producers with consumers.
Tim Shultz and Andrew Rathwell have created a convenient way to get local food into kitchens, and are helping to build a strong local food network in the province.
Local and Fresh began operating in December in Regina and provides an online grocery store with more than 400 Saskatchewan-made or grown products.
The quality and freshness of locally-produced food is superior to what’s found in the grocery store as it hasn’t spent days in shipping and storage. The price is sometimes higher, but since the food is fresher, there’s less spoilage and waste.
As Local and Fresh grows, so too will the local food supply chain and that will help drive down the price, says Rathwell.
“The cost of industrial food continues to go up and at the same time the quality goes down. Our bet is that when we build this right, the quality stays the same but the price goes down for local food.
“You pay for what you get. Quality is a factor.”
Shultz understands the challenges of reaching the local market from the producer side (he operates the Green Ranch, a community supported agriculture business, near Regina). He knew the producer isn’t always the best one to be marketing his own product.
“You’re so tied into production. It’s hard to do both. A lot of farmers, the reason why they’re farming is because they want to be in the background doing the production but not the marketing.”
He saw an opportunity to work for producers and help them reach the Saskatchewan market.
“We risk in some ways losing it if we don’t support it now. It’s hard for local producers to be able to conveniently find enough market for them to grow (their business). And that keeps them small (and) makes it difficult for consumers to be able to get the local food that they want. We’ve created this vicious cycle that we hope to reverse with Local and Fresh.”
Shultz uses his connections with producers to build the product line for Local and Fresh (there’s up to 40 represented on the site).
Rathwell says it’s hard to go back to mass produced food after you’ve tried something grown close to home: “The quality of the food in the industrial food system has got so bad.”
Transparency between the consumer and producer is another key component to Local and Fresh.
“In our house, (we call it) ‘Tim’s carrots.’ You’ve got a connection to the person who is producing the food that has been so lost in the grocery store,” says Rathwell.
“Our job at Local and Fresh is to really promote that story,” adds Shultz.
The two agree it’s a natural move to expand to Saskatoon. They’d love to build a provincial local food network, especially given the high number of producers in the Saskatoon area. But for now, they need to get it operating smoothly in Regina.