Cam Clark and his wife, Brittany Jubinville, were looking to buy beef but kept running into dead ends. The couple, who have a cow-calf operation near McRae, Alta., had the idea to create Arvo, an online farmers’ market, after being unable to find beef from within their own community.
“We’re pretty new in the cattle industry. We have cattle, and so many people asked me if they could buy beef off me, not understanding that a cow-calf operation doesn’t typically take beef to slaughter. But anybody who’s not in the ag side of things, they don’t understand that,” said Clark.
WHY IT MATTERS: The demand for direct to consumer sales is there, but traditional marketing tactics can be cumbersome for a producer.
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Clark and Jubinville received more than 20 phone calls from people looking for beef.
“We wanted to find beef for our freezer, and it was so clunky. It was really hard. We were on Facebook Marketplace, and you’re on all these different buy and sell sites, and you’re Googling and you’re talking to friends and neighbours, and that’s kind of where the idea was born,” he said.
Producers pay a lot of money to build their own websites and find ways to get web traffic.
“It’s really challenging to build an online presence on your own,” said Clark.
Prior to the creation of Arvo, there was no centralized platform for people to sell directly to consumers.
“People can do it, but they’ve got to forge their own path with their own marketing,” he said.
“There was no easy solution for a producer to sell directly to a consumer.”
The couple started talking about the idea about a year ago and approached Glen Fleming and Whitney Shaw to come on as partners.
Shaw put Clark and Jubinville in touch with Punchcard Systems, an Edmonton-based digital consultancy that developed the online farmers’ market.
Punchcard had expertise in the technical world, which combined well with Clark and Jubinville’s real-world experience as producers and consumers.
“I think it’s been an excellent partnership in getting the best of both worlds, finding realistic solutions that work for farmers and work for people looking for food, as well as getting the technical expertise to put it all together into a working application,” said Clark.
Jubinville said the platform is designed for producers.
“I know agriculture can be so time sensitive. We’re always trying to find more time, so we wanted to make it simple. Farmers are pretty tech savvy, but we wanted it to be simple just for the sake of time. How can you upload a picture quickly or quicken your marketing?”
“We’ve talked to people who shy away from selling directly because it’s so hard. It’s such a rat race to post, whether it’s social media and trying to get the word out there, or whether it’s local buy and sells. It can be very cumbersome when you’re trying to be in four different places at once online. It’s tough to reach the right audience. It’s tough to find the right audience,” said Clark.
Jubinville said the Arvo platform will allow consumers to find the specific items they are looking for. Some people prefer grass-fed beef or organic chickens, she said.
“They can source those farms,” she said.
Clark said Punchcard helped the vision come alive. The website was designed with full transparency and consumers can speak directly with the producers.
“We’re not gatekeeping any information. We’re not gatekeeping where your food’s coming from, which farm it is, who is selling it to you. We’re just providing the means to connect these people,” said Clark.
Arvo is just in its opening phase, and the group is working with a marketing team. They currently have two producers signed up and are working to gather more.
“We are about two weeks away from being full production, where we have everything completely ready to go. At that point, we are going to be doing everything from online marketing to cold calling, just going online and finding people who have an online presence already that may want to expand to farmers’ markets, to word of mouth. It’s going to have to be kind of an organic growth at first,” he said.
“One of the strategies that we did talk about is that we want to have producers on the platform. We want to have a good number of producers on the platform before we have consumers come on,” said Jubinville.
The initial pilot/launch of Arvo is focused on producers around the Edmonton area.
“Then hopefully we’ll be able to expand and eventually expand across Canada,” said Clark.
“Our focus for on-boarding is that we don’t want to spread ourselves too thin at the beginning, so we’re going to try and get as many Edmonton area-based producers as we can. But again, we’re not going to kick somebody off from Calgary if they find the site and join,” said Clark.
“It’s going to be important for us to get feedback from producers — if there are any tweaks we want to make with Punchcard on Arvo, then we can just do that, and make sure it’s kind of what everybody’s looking for,” he said.
Arvo also contains a map view, so people can see where their producers are located.
“If someone has a farm stand at their farm, or maybe they have a little farm shop and want consumers to pick up at their location, consumers can go to the farm, if that’s something the producer wants,” she said.
Producers may be able to ship, offer on farm pick up, or deliver to consumers and farmers’ markets.
The site operates like any other e-commerce site.
“They can pre-sell orders. We think this is something that could really add to the farmers’ market. We’re not coming after the farmers’ market. We’re looking to add to it, because the people that are selling their products at the farmers’ market are the people who are actively trying to sell directly to consumers already. We don’t want to take them from the farmers’ market. We want them to expand their reach and expand their client base, by using Arvo,” said Clark.
“There’s no cookie-cutter answer when it comes to selling direct because every producer and every consumer have different things they’re willing to do.”
