Northeast Indiana residents can now shop at a local farmers market without leaving the comfort of their homes.
Market Wagon, founded in Indianapolis in 2016, began operations in the greater Fort Wayne area in early February. The company’s goal is not only to provide access to local foods to area residents, but to enable local food producers to thrive in their local and regional markets, said Nick Carter, one of the founder/owners.
The concept grew out of an earlier business, Husk LLC, which supplied items from local producers to grocery stores.
“We discovered a huge swawth of farms and artisans who were never going to get their products in the door at a large supermarket,” Carter said. “They needed a way to get their products to consumers, and on the other side, there’s a growing mass of consumers who want to find those products. They no longer want to be fed cage-free eggs from the supermarket, they really want to know where their food is coming from. More and more farms want to get into direct-to-consumer distribution and more and more consumers are wanting that too.”
The business was launched as farmersmarket.com, but was rebranded in mid-2017 as Market Wagon, “because we wanted to convey the delivery aspect of what we do. We are bringing the farmers market to your door,” Carter added.
Here’s how it works: Consumers can go to marketwagon.com, select their geographic region, and then browse the vendors and products offered. Shoppers in Fort Wayne will get a different selection of products than shoppers in the Indianapolis, Evansville and Michiana markets the company also serves.
Market Wagon makes sure vendors are in compliance with applicable rules and regulations, but beyond that tries to get as many local vendors on board as possible and then lets the market decide what sells and who sells it.
Vendors list their products, providing their own photos and descriptions. and setting their own prices. Consumers can interact with the vendors if they have questions about how items are produced, and then can review the products they have purchased afterward. “Our customers are very engaged in how they’re buying their products,” Carter said.
Some of the service’s most popular vendors are those who produce items year-round: meats, eggs, dairy and baked goods, for example. But the selection also is seasonal as well as local. Right now, the market is selling every cucumber, tomato and pepper its farmers with greenhouses can produce. In July, the selection will be much more plentiful, Carter said.
Customers browse the website and place their weekly orders online by midnight each Tuesday night, and the company’s proprietary software produces tickets in the early hours of Wednesday morning that show vendors what has been purchased. Vendors fill the orders and deliver them between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. on Thursdays to the local hub, where they place them directly into the chilled and insulated market bags dedicated to each customer.
It’s not a matter of the vendor delivering a case of eggs to Market Wagon to distribute among buyers, it’s the vendor delivering cartons of eggs to each individual who ordered them. There is no minimum order, and each customer can buy from as many vendors as he or she wants.
Once filled, the bags go out for delivery and are in the customers’ hands by 2 p.m. the same day.
“Our model is unique in the way that we fulfill products. Large operations don’t want to do business with us, and we’ve designed it that way, so there’s a little bit of self selection, of how they have to get products to us just in time for delivery, so there’s no way the Georgia peach farmer could do this, could manage the logistics,” Carter said.
Customers can either choose to have orders delivered to their door, for a flat fee of $5.95, or they can have them delivered for free to a handful of local pickup centers – coffee shops, fitness centers and other retailers.
The Fort Wayne Market Wagon delivers to Allen, Adams, DeKalb, Huntington, Noble, Wells and Whitley counties.
Fort Wayne is the Hoosier company’s last Indiana market area. It plans to go national and add six to eight more markets out of state this year.
“We’re going to continue to stamp these out because there is such a demand for a market for local food,” Carter said.
Carter, the former CEO of Husk, had started successful software companies in Indianapolis prior to co-founding that company in 2012. He launched Market Wagon with Dan Brunner, an Indianapolis native and entrepreneur with extensive experience in food logistics. Brunner is the former vice president of Grocery Solutions for Kiva Systems, which was acquired by Amazon in 2012 for $775 million.