The majority of people buy their goods from grocery stores; goods such as vegetables, fruits, and dairy products. Oftentimes these goods are offered by local farms which might provide a fresher and healthier alternative. When the coivd19 hit a lot of people switched to buying locally and most of them report that eating locally matters for them.
Many times farmers have to go to the farmer's market and stay there for many hours, while on the other side people (customers) are busy or lazy to get to the farmer's market hence farms might not sell all their goods and people might miss on the opportunity to get those goods. This is not an efficient solution and automating this process would be better for farmers and customers.
I suggest a marketplace where each farm can list their goods and people can add items to one cart and order. At the moment a delivery 2 times/week, maybe on Wednesdays or Saturdays would work better than trying to deliver every day until a considerable number of customers is reached.
At the moment I see the problem of delivering the packages with food to the customers efficiently, safe, conviniently while trying to reduce the costs to the maximum.
delivery via "fresh packages" - country-wide post offices implement "fresh package delivery" via vans and trucks by embedding a small-size "refrigerator"; since they already have a distribution network, the software, and the workforce, this should not be a problem
regional distribution centers - building pop-up storage for every region, where a local farmer, once the order is set, can deliver the goods and from there the goods are distributed further; I imagine 20-30 regional centers in the country which work like marketplaces and fairs, too; from there the distribution could be organized by Bolt Food, Uber Eats, Wolt, Glovo or a similar app
delivery via "fresh packages" by buses - the same idea as above but via local bus network; embedding a "fresh corner" in bus cargo compartment; a good way for bus companies to earn money even when they don't have many passengers
I am not quite sure yet what delivery via "fresh packages" refers to and how it would work. (I would appreciate if Juran or someone else could share some more info and make it easier for me to understand.)
However, I understand the regional distribution centers and I like the idea. What I like about are the follows:
1) As idealy people would be able to order goods from different farms and mix them all in one cart, then a local farm might get order from 10 different people with different goods. Then each local farm can deliver all the goods the 10 people ordered to us. Maybe this can be done twice a week delivery, which means customers might get the goods on Wednesdays & Saturdays. After the farms deliver the food to us we make sure it is not damaged and we combine all the goods different people have ordered from each local farm and handle the packaging as Shubhankar Kulkarni suggested that "farms may not be equipped with materials to pack their produce into smaller packets (households will require smaller packets than the markets). This will lead to an additional packaging expense and time that the delivery company should try to reduce."
However different from Juran I think that having other delivery apps that do the delivery to the customers might not be idea as It will not be good for customers. They will have to pay a lot of dollars for delivery fees. For example uber eats charges a 15% service fee at least starting with 3 $ and no maximum. So if a customer orders a 100$ package, he will have to pay 15$. This is the opposite of what we would ideally offer to customers such as: "Order a package of 100$ and get free delivery. " Ubereats does not provide this.
Hence I recommend we personally deliver all the good to different customers in one full day, by doing these only Wednesdays and Saturdays. Knowing we have 20 orders to deliver in one day, we know the location of each customer and we try to find a path that minimizes the distance. We can hire one person to deliver all the goods in that day.
However there might still be some problems:
1) One problem might be, local farms not being able to deliver the food to our packaging station.
2) Another problem is that customers might want thier goods to be delivered faster.
3) Having our own packaging station might be costly, (paying for the rent of the physical place, and hiring someone to handle the packaging) - I think Juran suggested we could utilize this physical space of packaging as a physical store too where we sell different food goods? (This ideally might help with the expanses of the rent)
If you have any suggestion please let me know. I would appreciate it a lot!
Daniel Drazhi Nov 08, 2021
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