Moving Along

After the flurry to get the Croparazzi site running, I needed to turn my attention back to the real world of farming for a little while. (Plus a few days off) This week our Meyer Lemons will be featured at a farmer’s dinner at the Sidecar Restaurant in Ventura, alongside Ventura Limoncello.

www.thesidecarrestaurant.com

www.venturalimoncello.com

Beta site goes live

OK, the initial site is up and operating at croparazzi.com. Still a few bugs for me to work out, but most are not visible to a user. No word yet on the CDFA grant, but if it doesn’t go this round there is always the next one….

Thoughts on Business Model

Use of the site for buyers and sellers will be free. For a personal page with blog and email  (yourname@croparazzi.com), $15 /month. The first 10 subscribers will be free for the first year to help build the community. Of course rates will have to be subject to change… Once a more sophisticated tecnology platform is in place, model will probably shift toward click-through advertising and a small transaction fee. There will probably always be room for a homepage banner ad, rates TBA.

“Pre-Beta” site live

A very crude bulletin board style site is active on our farm’s website. To see it (or better yet, USE it), go to www.saticoyroots.com. Next to our logo you will see a link for Croparazzi BBS. Click that, and we are in business!

A few thoughts of the day…

It’s been interesting looking at all the possibilities for the Croparazzi portal. One that I am making live on this site is a link to the Los Angeles Terminal market. I often use it as a gauge for pricing. Links to it are posted at right.

Coming up from our farm: Figs. We should have a number  available starting in a couple of weeks. Tentatively $2 / pint basket.

Some quick thanks!

Upon getting this started, I knew that one of my first contacts had to be Jon Ramer of the Interra Project. I got to know Jon last year as part of the Roots of Change Planning Fellow program, and I was sure that he would know the right person or people to talk to.

Suspicion confirmed: Jon put me in touch with Tim Colby of Growing Washington. It turns out that they have a site very much like the one I am considering that is currently up and running. (Link at right.) He was also aware of a platform underdevelopment that takes the concept even further, and is exactly what I hoped might be available in a year or two. (Again, link at right)

Thanks to both these gentlemen my learning process continues.

CDFA submission text

At present, the ability of consumers to shop for locally grown agricultural products is highly limited. Farmer’s markets, farmstands, and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) projects offer consumer a variety of ways to access local food, but they all have difficulty scaling to attract a larger cross section of consumers demand. To grow the market for local food, California needs to move beyond the constraints of the present models.

 

Croparazzi will provide consumers and farmers with a platform to conduct a virtual Farmer’s Market. Growers will be able to continually market their crops, and consumers will have actionable information to spur sales immediately No longer will the Farmer’s Market be a once-a-week activity, limited to the small number of growers and consumers who accept the limitations of the current model. Consumers and farmers will also be able to access social network content, such as blogs from local farmers, chefs and foodies, which will add to the richness of the user experience and provide a vehicle for growers and consumers to interact without geographical or time limitations as well as serve as an educational tool for consumers regarding California produce.

 

What makes local food a logical choice for the online world? The local food movement has a strong sense of community, but information on pricing and availability is highly fragmented. Many growers find themselves to be just a bit too large or too small to effectively capitalize on the existing models, but online market scales up or down effortlessly. Local food products themselves are highly differentiated, valuable, and perishable, making them ideally suited to real-time sales. Strong community, differentiated products, and fragmented information are characteristics of other niches that have been successfully served over the internet. Local food will be next.

 

About the Croparazzi project. Project leadership is provided by Chris Sayer, a fifth generation Ventura County citrus and avocado farmer. As a member of Ventura County’s Ag Futures Alliance, a Roots of Change Planning Fellow, University of California Hansen Trust Advisory Boardmember , and Director for several agricultural organizations and businesses, Chris has done considerable work in the field of sustaining local agriculture. But perhaps more relevant to this project was experience from his “previous life”, as a Executive Search Consultant in Silicon Valley, where he worked with the management teams of several early  eCommerce leaders, such as Mercata and OnSale.

 

Technology Strategy: The tools for an effective eCommerce site are readily available from a variety of vendors, including at least one tailored precisely for this application. Local web design talent will provide a unique face to the commercially available transaction platform. A very simple, “Croparazzi 0.1” beta site will soon be operating in Ventura County, which will allow basic bulletin board postings, along with simple blog and forum capabilities. “Croparazzi 1.0” is targeted for April of 2009, which will introduce online sales and credit card processing capability, 100,000 item inventory, and a more robust social networking aspect. It is anticipated that the platform will be capable of scaling to multiple California markets at this stage. There is a tentative 2010 timeline for “Croparazzi 2.0”, which will introduce greater database capability and better data management tools. “2.0” is a site capable of scaling to a statewide and national network of local Croparazzi nodes.

 

Marketing Strategy: The Ventura County local food movement is highly interconnected, and personal relationships, word of mouth, and good connections with local media will allow for a strong local launch. The buzz from a strong start in Ventura, when combined with the statewide Roots of Change Changemaker’s Network and Ag Futures Alliance will be the entre to other California markets.

 

Business Model: Croparazzi will not be an online grocery, buyer or distributor. Our product is the platform; we exist for our farmers and consumers. Croparazzi will remain a privately held venture, but it will directly support the local food movement both in its impacts and business strategy. A “Giveback” component is not only part of our strategy, it is also part of our commitment to the local food movement. While it is not yet clear whether it will take the form of a percentage of profits, advertising or merchandising sales, or “pennies per click”, some portion of Croparazzi’s revenues will return to non-profits in this arena.

 

Open Source Philosophy: While we will be bound by the licensing requirements of third party technology providers, development of the site and business model will be chronicled at the Croparazzi site as well as a dedicated blog at www.croparazzi.wordpress.com. The participation of stakeholders is not only expected to help refine the vision, but be an integral part of the marketing and social networking strategy.

 

While it is expected that the site content will have a education and outreach benefit, Croparazzi will advance the Trade Enhancement/Innovation goal of the California Department of Food Agriculture Block Grant program. Croparazzi’s goal is to release local food from the constraints of unscalable distribution models, and allow local food to become a major pillar of tomorrow’s California food system.

Croparazzi: Taking a Leap

In my “Long Tail” post a few days back, I discussed the opportunity/need for a different approach to local food. At the time I wrote that I was already working on an answer, but I wasn’t yet sure if it was time to acknowledge it publicly.  But after talking it over with a few people and looking for other sites trying a similar approach, I decided it was time to do it. I’m going to build this thing.

A quick recap of where current models are lacking: All current food guides or directories list farms and restaurants, but not the produce. It is an old model, a yellow pages type model. It isn’t real time, it’s not comprehensive. Local food seems a natural for online. It’s ”nichy”, valuable, time -sensitive, and has a fairly coherent built-in community despite highly  fragmented information on pricing and availability.

 

To more fully flesh out the concept:

One site that allows shoppers to see what farmers actually have available and buy or pre-order online.

A method for chefs and caterers to manage their supply of fresh, local produce in the quantities that they require.

Community based content with profile pages for local farms and restaurants, message boards, and blogs on food and farming.

Personality and Community are at the center of the concept. Consumers will come to the site because it is the most reliable way to source local foods, but meeting the farmers and chefs and food journalists will keep it interesting, and suggest new food ideas, thus reinforcing the

 

I’ll break down a lot of the individual concepts in later posts. Participation, benefits, business models, and marketing strategies are all evolving. I’ll start with what I know to be the core of the concept.

 

Community-building: For this thing to fly, it has to develop a community of people that love it. I know there is a community of people that love local food here in Ventura. If this site captures that love, and helps to build it, I will have succeeded.

 

Openness: I want openness to be in the very DNA of this venture. That’s why I am chronicling the development of the site in its own blog. I’ll have some good ideas, and a lot of bad ones… I hope that by posting them, I can have help telling the difference.

 

Good information: From the beginning, I will try to be sure that I offer good information, not simply more information.

 

And the name?

Croparazzi.com : Sort of a play on the celebrity farmer phenomena, a bit whimsical.
-or-

Nichefork.com: Rhymes with the iconic farm implement, but “niche” and ”fork” combine to give a foody vibe.

I have registered both, but I am using Croparazzi as a working name. More on that later, also. Track this project’s progress at croparazzi.wordpress.com, and start looking for the “larval stage” site at www.croparazzi.com