Local Line, an innovative sales and distribution platform for food suppliers, has recently launched a Local Line Community Forum, a digital place for like-minded farmers, food suppliers and food hubs across North America to connect online!
It’s all about connecting similar businesses that are facing the same challenges and opportunities.
Local Line users can easily access the Forum from their account homepage, and then simply set up a profile to let others in the Local Line community know who they are before engaging.
The Forum provides a great digital space for local farmers across North America to learn from each other.
“Today,” Cole Jones, Local Line CEO, shares, “if you’re a local farm doing direct marketing, you can really only connect with other farmers in your area doing the same thing, and when you do, sometimes you’re competitive and it’s hard for people to share what’s working and what’s not to grow their business.”
Local Line has customers in six provinces and 21 states, so plenty of recurring challenges and themes have emerged.
“Eventually, we got to the point where we thought it would be better that instead of us sharing the learnings with our customers,” Cole explains, “we just let them connect directly. So for example, we recently had a farmer in California attempting to break into the wholesale market after serving the consumer market for more than 12 years. By enabling them to connect directly with a Local Line customer in Ontario who has been selling wholesale for 30+ years, they automatically have a wealth of knowledge to learn from, and it’s not competitive because they’re in different parts of North America.”
Local Line previously facilitated these sort of beneficial introductions and connections too, but now the Forum has made it more direct between the users themselves. Users can ask questions and connect with other businesses similar to theirs, who are trying to solve the same challenges.
“The mission for us is to make local food commercially accessible by providing farmers and food producers the tools they need to be successful, independent entrepreneurs,” Cole shares. “Naturally, we just thought that creating a spot in our platform for everyone to connect would be a win-win-win.”
Check out the Local Line website to learn more about joining the conversation and navigating the Forum.