Online market a lifeline for F&B producers

Maker2u, the online farmers market, which launched on 23rd March, is providing much needed new sales to artisan food and beverage producers that have had other sales channels collapse with Covid-19.

The farmers market now has 220 stores from small producers of food, drinks and other goods. It’s free for approved makers to set up a store. Shoppers buy direct from the maker and goods are sent by courier.

Maker2u.com was created by Canterbury couple Hamish and Suzy Hutton to help friends with small businesses get more of the final retail price of their products than they were getting from the supermarket duopoly.

“It took two years to build maker2u.com and Maker2uCellar.com,” says Hamish. “We were planning to launch mid 2020, but with COVID-19 hitting our makers’ exports and hospitality sales so hard, we threw everything into launching as soon as possible for them.

“We felt it was unethical to profit from the Covid crisis,” adds Suzy, “so we’ve reduced the marketplace commission to 10 percent, which only covers the credit card fees and costs of operation. We have an amazing team of friends who are helping us to provide customer support.”

The number of stores is growing daily and some amazing producers have come on board, she says. Six thousand shoppers have visited Maker2u “which is high for week one of any new site,” says Suzy. “People are clearly loving browsing so many great Kiwi products because the average site visit is well over four minutes”.

The marketplace is split into Maker2u.com, for New Zealand-made artisan food, health and beauty and other groceries; and Maker2uCellar.com, a licensed seller of boutique wines, craft beers, cider, artisan spirits and other drinks. Everything must be made in New Zealand and all makers receive 90 percent of the price with no cost of sale.

“We’re excited to already have some of New Zealand’s finest producers on board,’ says Suzy, ‘Covid is catastrophic for these important regional employers but, with everyone’s support they will survive and keep their communities strong.”

“Maker2u is a highly resilient food supply system too,” adds Hamish. “It relies on small factories dotted round New Zealand and the national courier fleet. It doesn’t suffer from the bottlenecks supermarket home delivery has.”

The Maker2u team feel privileged to be working with a growing number of amazing Kiwi entrepreneurs and are very excited about the future post-COVID-19. “Our mission’, says Hamish, ‘is to make it easy for Kiwi families to browse and purchase direct from all of New Zealand’s incredible boutique makers. In the long run we’re also planning to open the platform up to export orders from target markets offshore.”