It is described as an online farmers market. Market Wagon is connecting consumers with farmers.
Jeffrey Turner is one of the first farmers to arrive at the Market Wagon warehouse just north of Nashville. He and his wife run Shop Springs Dairy Farm and Creamery in Lebanon, Tennessee.
“It’s been pretty good for us,” Turner states. “It allows us to reach a consumer that ordinarily we wouldn’t get to reach.”
Turner along with other Tennessee and Kentucky farmers fill up these bags with items that have been pre-ordered by customers.
According to Nick Carter, the founder and CEO of Market Wagon, “The events of 2020 really highlighted for people a lot of the frailty in our food supply, but also highlighted the strength in our local farmers... Farmers and artisans in the local community stood up and answered the call. We found out that we could really trust the American farmer to bring us the food that we need.”
From Batey Farms pork to beef from Bradshaw Family Farm or even all natural skin care from Sugies, these totes are totally filled with everything one could find at a farmers market. For the vendor, it takes the guesswork out of trying to figure out how much to take and exactly what will sell.
“Everything that we make is sold. We get a list of customers; we get a list of products,” Max Beaver of St. Athanasius Bakery states.
The way it works is you go to marketwagon.com, find the one that delivers to your area and place your order. Farmers drop it off once a week at the warehouse and then it is brought to your front door the same day.
“Throughout all of human history, relationships have been built around food, and that is something we sort of lost over the last couple of decades when food became something you just picked up in a package in a well lit aisle,” Carter adds. “We lost some of the relationship. There’s intangibles that we don’t really realize we lost when we didn’t really know who was baking our bread. We didn’t know the name of the guy that raised the cow that we’re having for dinner. Today, we are being able to restore that.”
For Gabby Ledd at Hopewell Farms, it is a great way to keep the relationship between the local farmer and the customer thriving, even during a pandemic and the cold winter months.
“It helps provide a lot of customers during the winter time and we get to serve all these people our awesome food,” she states.
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