Traditional methods, such as farmers markets and roadside stands, are limited in their reach and scalability, while intermediaries often extract significant margins, leaving farmers with diminished returns.
Fostering a thriving local food economy, technology provides the tools to reach a wider audience, enhance operational efficiency, gain valuable insights, and ensure secure transactions, empowering local farmers to thrive in the modern food landscape.
While several tools are merely transactional, a few focus on helping local farmers, smaller dairy producers, poultry and hobby cattle growers to build profitable relationships, and ensure each customer becomes an advocate.
3rd Montadino biologico di Monteriggioni, Italy
EU-BIO certified, Net-Zero local grower
With limited labour to harvest, local farmers often don't have much of the resources needed to reach the customers most likely to buy from them. Their ability to market value-added products is just as limited, despite a market increasingly interested in such offering.
What are some of the challenges and how Troly addresses them?
Farmers markets and roadside stands often have limited visibility and accessibility, restricting their customer base.
With Troly you only need check a few boxes about you and the story telling begins. Everyone coming into contact with you you will gradually learn why your products are different and how doing business with you is better.
Due to the nature of the farming business (harvest is planned by Mother Nature!) the planning and execution of sales & marketing work is left as a secondary priority.
While your mind is focused on getting the product out of the fields lining up the right customer is left last.
From pre-allocation of harvest, to recurrent bundles and to limited-availability invite-only products, Troly offers the tools to go directly to customers who are most interested about your product.
You define your product inventory, and we identify new sales opportunities for you.
Like many smaller businesses struggle, understanding consumer preferences, market trends, and effectively target their sales sales. Let alone collect, analyse and act on data.
Instantly take advantage of new technologies and communications ability for your brand. Using Troly you gain the ability to communicate with every customer using the channel they prefer.
Don't just send emails to everyone. From SMS to Direct Messages on the most popular social media platforms, this is seamless to you, so much better for your customer.
Local and direct-to-consumer farmers who recognise their products shouldn't compete just on price are better position to drive a successful business. Thanks to the general lack of scalability of your production and the limited resources (time/capital/skills) available, using a smart technology can change your business outlook.
What are the opportunities and how Troly improves upon them?
From farmers markets, to special events, it's important to participate in community events to connect with local customers. Build relationships while showcasing your products.
Using a technology like Troly not only allows automating some of the relationship building effort, but also help turn and track your most vocal advocates.
Those customers who help generate sales and awareness are very important and Troly helps you make them feel special.
Leverage your own story and day-to-day to educate consumers about your reality. The benefits of buying locally grown food, and the difference it makes in taste and nutrition, are undeniable
Turn your 1-on-1 ad-hoc conversations with customers into a brand building exercise. Use Troly to ensure customers receive more information about your your story, your operation, your values and your impact the local supply-chain.
With Troly you get help to better highlight the reason why local economies need local producers and farmers of all kind.
Processing and selling value-added products, such as jams, jellies, special-cut meat products, or bundles made of local products increases the revenue generated and product exposure to customers day-to-day lives.
Value-added products need more of your time to prepare, and package. Selling is the easy part, thanks to Troly.
Record customer interest before products are made, and turn their interest into a committed purchase, sometimes with pre-payment, as soon as you decided to making the products.
No card required, no inconvenient sales call or demo, no wait!
The survival rate of family farms doesn't have to be based on your access to financial resources or your production volume. Using the right technology will help you sell at the right price and with lesser effort
Using Troly has allowed Giovanni to capture pre-payments and orders online, making loyal customers extra special and able to "skip the queue" when visiting him at markets.
Every order and customer is assigned a unique QR code making the tracking of orders collected extra simple.
Instead of paying upfront for marketing work and searching for the most appropriate 'influencers' in his network, Giovanni unleashed technology and eliminated the guesswork.
Using the referral tracking capabilities in Troly, he was able to accurately discover and reward (after the fact) his top-10 customers for talking to their friends and referring in new sales & club members. He called it a win-win-win!
After launching a "Basket of the Moment" club, the farm was able to group together over 650 loyal supporters paying $25 per month for the benefit of receiving 6 pre-allocated orders during harvest months.
Using Troly allowed Giovanni a more steady income, and guaranteed more consistent sales to most loyal customers.
As suggested by the Troly opportunity engine® most customers were very engaged and appreciated the better quality of Giovanni's products.
Activating the auto-marketing and price tracking features of Troly has increased his overall margins, making each sale more fair on his business, and more valuable to customers.
Gone are the days where farmers compete with large surfaces and industrials.
