Grub Trade is a totally free online platform that simply connects food producers of all types with buyers in their area, which could be anything from helping a professional farmer sell direct to buyers or simply someone with a garden, greenhouse, or apple tree to get rid of a surplus.
While producers can put prices on the items they add to the system, we’ve also added a new feature, “Free to a Good Cause”, which lets producers tag some items as possibly free. This will let certain types of organisations, such as food banks, soup kitchens, or maybe schools and community groups, to source healthy, local, seasonal produce at no cost.
It couldn’t be easier to use!
Here’s how it works…
Set default option?
If you’re a producer and would like all your produce to default to “Free to a good cause”, click on “Home” > “Edit your production standards” and select the “Free to a good cause” checkbox.
Of course, you can switch FGC off or on for any item, whether you’ve applied this standard or not.
Setting for individual produce
When adding a new item, or editing an existing one, just select the “Free to a good cause” checkbox to set, which you’ll see next to the price option. This means you may consider donating the item.
If you have selected the FGC standard, any new items you add will have the free option on by default.
If you don’t want to sell the item at all, you may also choose to set the price to zero.
This screenshot shows British Pounds, but prices should default to your national currency.
Now, you’ll see any FGC items displayed with a heart icon in your produce list.
Buyers will see the same heart icon when browsing. Here, the artichokes may be donated free, but the tomatoes are available to buy only.
Buyers can also filter to see ONLY items that are free to a good cause, simply by clicking the button in the filter options.
Now, when buyers select to add an item to an order and then go on to place the order, they just need to add a note to say they are requesting the item for free. The producer may then negotiate and the two parties can agree a final price, if required.
Grub Trade doesn’t handle payment, we just leave this up to buyers and producers to agree.
To sign up free as a buyer or producer, just go to the home page.
Please feel free to ask any questions, give your feedback, or make suggestions in the comments.