Richard Perkins (speaker) describes the RICO/REKO pre-sold farmers market model (originating in Finland) and why he prefers it: it enables online pre-orders that circumvent some trading hassles, creates direct contact with customers, offers transparent peer-sales data (healthy competition), and allows rapid drop-offs (30–45 minutes) of high-value farm products. He notes practical details: his farm sells within a ~50 km radius, the local RICO group exposes them to ~8,000 customers, typical products include eggs, chickens (fresh and smoked), turkeys and vegetable boxes, customers pay via apps like Swish or card readers, and the model requires a critical mass of producers. He briefly promotes a 10-day Ireland regenerative agriculture training and an upcoming road trip to visit partner farms.
Questions this video answers
About 50 kilometers.
About 8,000 customers.
A 10-day intensive.
Thomas Snellman (REKO).
Between 30 and 45 minutes.
Chapters
Okay, thank you.
So we're at Rico and Karlstadt. It's one of my favourite methods of selling actually. And this is the biggest selling radius that we have, about 50 kilometers from the farm, which is the maximum that we sell products from our farm. I just wanted to let you folks know that I'm going to be in Ireland in less than three weeks time.
Now.
I'm coming over in my vehicle and I'm planning a long trip through Norway, Denmark and the UK to visit maybe four, five or six farms that are run by students of ours who are doing amazing work and quite a range of different places from vegetable producers on a very small scale to big farms that have decades of history. So I'm really excited to be able to bring that to you. I know that they have eight spots left on the course in Ireland, so if you're in the UK or in Ireland, that's a particularly good chance to come and take a training with myself and come and meet some amazing crew. These guys are all really good friends that are all pro surfers that have turned their attention to restoring landscape. They run a very productive market garden and have a huge tree planting charity and just bought a huge piece of land that they are planting native trees back into and really focused on how they can benefit their local community in different ways. And so that's the last official training that I'm running for quite some time now. So if you're looking to do any training with me in the next six to eight months, then this is your last chance. It's going to be great to be in Ireland and I'm going to be on a road trip until then, bringing you some great videos from amazing farms along the way and just really excited to share some amazing upcoming regenerative agriculture projects. Just wanted to say that's in the links below if you want to come and meet us in Ireland. It's going to be an amazing 10 day intensive on how to do production small scale regenerative agriculture farming for a living. So it's quite different to the sort of typical permaculture trainings that you'll find in that pilot world. This is about full on profitable soil, building, community, rebuilding, regenerative agriculture. So I hope to meet some of you there and really excited to hang out with those folks there and be a benefit through the training that we can offer.
So there's been some confusion amongst international viewers about what RICO actually is.
And the best way I can describe.
It, it's like a pre sold farmers market. So it' one Way to get around trading laws. There's also a way to turn up a market, as it were, without bringing stuff you haven't sold. So there's wastage. But by trading online before we even get here, it helps get around trading laws. So that enables us to turn this car park, which is just a typical car park just off the big highway in the middle of a busier town. This is our biggest selling point into a merchant zone essentially. And so we have two things going on here. We have always done drop offs before Ricoh came along. It's a movement that came out of Finland and is spread across Scandinavia.
But we were doing from year one.
We were making drop off points. We have customers that are on those regular drop offs anyway. And then we have customers who are coming for Ricoh specifically. But it's still my favorite sales model because of three simple things. One, it puts you in direct contact with your customers. And in this little Ricoh group alone there's 8,000 customers exposed to our products. By collaborating with other producers we get a much wider exposure to a bigger group.
Two is the transparency.
So you can see the other producers sales now. There's other vegetable producers in this group and other egg producers in this group. And it's quite interesting to watch. We've been, I would say a trendsetter in this car. Segs Rico ring because we were some of the initial force behind it and Johanna's been a big part of being me had win and we steered that to be at a time and place that we already used as a drop off. So it was very convenient for us to facilitate that happening. And it's a good location for. But that transparency is really great. It allows this healthy kind of competition where you can see this person is growing their sales more than mine. So what are they doing and how can they do that differently? And I think that's a really healthy element of a healthy ecosystem is this healthy competition. And the third and biggest reason that.
We love Ricoh, I think is that.
It'S just the most rapid way to come and drop off thousands of euros of products. We're selling eggs, chickens, smoked chickens, turkeys, vegetable boxes. And it's sell selling is half the work of any farming basically. And so this is a model where.
We can turn up for between 30.
And 45 minutes and just drop off all that product to the type of customer who is willing to come and meet you in a car park. So we've timed it well. It's kind of ended the working day. People are on their way home. So it's not so much hassle for them. And that's one of the benefits of having a nix group is that the customer can come and pick up a range of products and makes it much more convenient for them than in the old days when it was just us dropping. But that time saving is such a critical because we've got to go home and do animal chores and still work in the garden or whatever it is. So having customers that want to meet us halfway there is such a critical thing that I really encourage you to look at ways of doing that because it's, you know, it's very different to standing at farmers market all day not actually knowing what we're going to sell here. We've pre sold everything in advance. Customers can settle up with Cash Swish, which is an app on the phone that people use or with car payments through Little Eye Settlers like card reader that we have here. But everything's technically pre sold because it's been ordered online before. That makes the model awesome. So I'd recommend that if you don't have access to Ricoh in the countries you're in, to consider if you can work with other producers to create a kind of critical mass to set this kind of thing up on your own. There is information online about Rico. It's R E K O Thomas Snellman in Finland that set that up and he's been busy helping spread that across Scandinavia. But one of the critical things that makes it work in my mind is a critical mass of producers. Good two, three people who haven't come yet. Maybe we'll see them in a bit. Yeah. It's the first time after the fresh chicken's out, so we can see that in the sales a bit. It drops a little bit after the fresh chicken. We're out of fresh chicken now because we finished strawberry last week. And so we see a little sales dip. We're trying the pulled smoked chicken today. This is the product we've been. So this is the new product we've been making in the slaw day. This is essentially half a bird in its weight round.
And how have they been?
Thank you.
Smell chicken from the farm.
It's good. It's really, really good. Thank you.
Something I'd say to those of you who are not in Scandinavia, this is a model you could set up now.
It requires a lot of pre thought.
And there might be models of food hubs and local food nodes in the country you come from that you might want to consider participating in one of those. But if you have that initiator kind of energy, then what I would say is it's good to get a critical mass people together. And I think that's been our experience setting up different Ricos around our selling radius here. We can come for 30 to 40 minutes, drop off everything and be out of there. And that's really a great model to work with when you have chores to do at home. And it gives just enough customer interaction for customers to feel connected and satisfied. And they're all busy too, right. So they're very happy to be served efficiently and quickly and be able to pick up from different people their bread and eggs and milk and cheese, whatever, and then get out of there. So it really helps to have multiple producers. And whilst that might seem counterproductive because you've got competition, I think that kind of healthy competition is really beneficial for the marketplace. It's really good to drive in innovation and creativity as well as collaboration. And these are all people we see every week. So there's relationships built up there where we can share best practices on our farms, etc. There's different producers here from meat producers to other vegetable producers, other fasted egg producers as baker and cheese maker. So it really creates this whole array of products that excites people to come here. It's a lot more value than just coming to a drop off point like we set up in the beginning where it was just us there. It's still the best sales model I've seen because the open transparency, the rapid transition and turnaround of product and there's zero operating fees, it's just run on Facebook, it takes a little bit of time from the admins, but there's no market fees and there's no standing around all day to get rid of thousands of viewers of products. So for me it's the best sales model I've ever come across.
