I did a post several days ago about some Greek Olive Oil I bought at a farmers market, fairly direct from the farm and with a picture of the farmer on the label.
Completely by coincidence, I was looking for hand soap the other day.
There’s a local shop I used to like buying my soap from, a natural food store. Years ago it used to be a sort of food cooperative, but was bought by a larger chain. Over the years they’ve been slowly going from selling local organic foods to selling yuppie vitamins and certified organic processed foods. While they’re still a local business, it’s getting harder and harder to justify buying anything from them any more. Until a few months ago I bought my soap from them, as they sold a locally made, reasonably priced, relatively natural and vegetable based soap. Lately they seem to be having troubles with their suppliers, don’t have much in stock, and the prices are going up. They’ve also been trying to push their customers onto more expensive and processed alternatives.
As much as it really annoyed me to do so, I started looking on Amazon and thinking about an order I could make with free shipping… In my case there’s no local Amazon, the closest is Germany, but they often have free shipping to here.
I really didn’t want to order my bath soap this way, so I started looking for some alternatives that were more local.
I found Dendres who, at least according to their website, are Greek farmers who sell their olive oil and olive oil products via a warehouse in the Netherlands. As you can see from the picture above, I did get my order from them as expected. It was cheaper than anything else I found anywhere, even though I did pay for shipping. Beyond this and what it says on their website, I don’t know anything about them.
Anyone else have any good examples of buying online directly from farmers? How about distribution networks that help farmers sell their products directly in this way? It would be nice to promote and more easily find farmers like this. It would also be nice if there was some sort of certification, to prevent non-farmers from claiming to be farmers, something like the way farmers markets are sometimes certified in the US as having only farmers selling their own products or perhaps those of another certified farmer.
Are there any farmers out there who sell your own products this way?
