The Food Market was founded by Wendy Snowdon, with 5 years experience at Amazon, running Books, then 6 years as Head of Digital / Head of Business Development at Play. It’s also backed by the founders of MoneySupermarket.com, Play.com and feelunique.com.
The Food Market Proposition
Focusing on ethical food and drink (including organic, Fairtrade, sustainably-sourced), The Food Market targets discerning customers who care about the quality of ingredients and provenance of the products. They look for merchants who share their values, believe in first class customer service, are able to fulfil orders directly to customers and produce or sell products meeting their criteria.
The Merchant Proposition
The focus is on supporting independent merchants producing or selling natural or organic products (i.e. made without the use of unnecessary artificial ingredients). It’s easy to join, with no joining fee and no minimum contract and The Food Market then promote your brand, your story and your products – it’s all about you.
A store front is created for each merchant, where your values, photos and story is clear for customers to see, as well as your listings. Merchants are encouraged to provide with recipes, blogs and special offers, which all help secure extra coverage with The Food Market. You’ll also be pleased to hear that merchants and customers can always speak to a human!
Currently over 150 merchants offer more than 3,000 products to discerning customers.
Popularity of The Food Market
Checking Alexa today for a rough idea of The Food Market’s traffic, they are the 54,995th ranked website in the UK with a global rank of 921,376. It’s not a fantastic ranking, but it’s by no means a disaster. They’re a nascent fledgling specialist niche marketplace so you wouldn’t expect their traffic to rival the likes of eBay. What’s important is that they do have traffic and that traffic will be exclusively foodies, so if you supply specialist food they should be of interest as a selling venue.
Signing up to The Food Market
Signing up is easy, you just complete a registration form. Then you’ll need to provide product info in either your own spreadsheet, or fill in a product form (if you only have a handful of products). The Food Market do all the setup and send it to you to approve. You then immediately become part of The Food Market marketing engine for online advertising and social media exposure.
Become an Investor
The Food Market are raising their third round of investment via crowdfunding, on Crowdcube. Investments can be as little as £10, with both shares and rewards (such as discounts, tastings and hampers) provided. They have already raised over £140k of their £200k target and have over 200 investors on board so far.
