Virtual farmers’ market claims it’s green in reality
Peta Hodge
16th December 2009
The first ever interactive 3D Virtual Farmers’ Market (VFM) is set to launch next month, promising to offer environmental benefits and help local producers increase the number of customers they sell to.
The VFM, which launches to consumers on January 1 next year, uses 3D games technology to allow customers to ‘stroll’ around more than 45 market stalls, where they can view products, interact with the producers and buy the same environmentally-friendly artisan-produced food and drink they might find in a real-life farmers’ market.
By enabling the consumer to ‘meet’ the producer via a video stream, the VFM can provide consumers with detailed information about how their food and drink has been produced, what ingredients have been used and where they have been sourced – in a similar way to a ‘real-life’ farmers’ market.
While it may not compete with traditional farmers market in terms of food miles, the online market will help local producers that sell at them reach new customers. “The VFM is purely targeting the existing online supermarket shopper – people who want food delivered to their house," said its founder, Marcus Carter.
According to Carter, people who wanted to buy artisan-produced food online have, in the past, generally had to go to each producer direct – what the VFM allows them to do is consolidate all the orders through one delivery box.
“The consumer might be buying four or five things a month from four or five different companies. By consolidating it all into one box we are reducing the food miles to a certain degree,” said Carter.
For the producers who have taken a ‘stall’ at the VFM there is the potential to get their products (which range from free range rare breed pork to spicy organic parsnip soup) to a much wider customer base than they could have achieve through traditional retail outlets – and in a way that is more environmentally-friendly too, suggested Carter.
“In order to get access to the same number of customers, they would have had to have gone to 50 different shops repping, they would have had to have done 50 different deliveries and so on.
“Sometimes people forget about the bit between the manufacturer and the shop. There’s an awful lot of running around in the middle , getting appointments, sampling, tasting...”
Figures from Mintel suggest the online grocery market is likely to rise from £4.4 billion in 2009 to £6.9 billion in 2014.
“We’ve already got a very warm group of customers that have already said they shop online, we’re just going after those guys,” summed up Carter.
“If you push a shopping trolley around a supermarket, you’re more likely to walk to a farmers market in real life. If you shop online at a supermarket there isn’t really an alternative. What I’m trying to do, by putting the voices and the faces of producers online, is allow consumers to make educated decisions about the food they want to buy.”