Along with sellers in Squamish, on Vancouver Island, products can now be purchased from producers West Coast Spores in the Cowichan Valley and Glassen Farms in Nanaimo. Pictured is Ben Glassen of Glassen Farms (Lauryn Mackenzie /CHLY 101.7fm)

A local software developer wants to make buying local produce to support Vancouver Island farmers a lot easier with a new website.

“I want to see people feeling connected to their food again. I want to see people feeling empowered to grow their food, to share their food with their communities, and to support each other,” said Josh Fraser, a software developer and co-founder of the online platform Home Grown.

Home Grown is a new online marketplace for local food that helps local farmers, bakers, and makers connect with people wanting to purchase local food items.

Fraser and his business partner Michelle Gordon both shared an interest in buying local produce and goods. But after finding out how surprisingly hard it can be to buy locally, they came up with an idea.

“I think that's a problem a lot of people have, is how to connect with the community that underpins an area. So that was the challenge that I wanted to solve, was make it easy for people to just jump in and see, ‘okay, this is who's selling in my area,” Fraser said. “These are the farms that are here. These are maybe the new, up and coming folks who are who are just starting out, and I can go buy direct from them, and I don't have to wade through the sea of Google search results that don't really match what I'm looking for to find it.’”

While many local producers may attend farmers’ markets, Fraser said this platform allows buyers to know when and what markets they’ll be attending and other ways to purchase food or items they produce.

“If you're like me, your life is probably pretty chaotic, and you may not be able to make it to those farmers markets, or you may not be able to plan and buy enough from those markets to fuel your week,” he said. “So fundamentally, it's hard to use a farmers’ market as your full time—like ‘this is where my food is coming from,’ and if you are like me, and you want to buy more local food than just once a week, there's not really a whole lot of other options. So that's kind of what we're trying to get at, is can we provide some, some other avenues for people to buy local more than just once a week?”

Home Grown makes it easier for farmers and food producers to sell their goods outside of farmer markets.

Sellers will get the chance to list the pick up locations for the buyers to meet them at whether it is at a commercial kitchen, a farm, or a farmers’ market.

“So if you're selling out of multiple markets, or say, like a market and a farm stand, or are producing salsa at two different commercial kitchens throughout the week, rather than try to get them to do something else, we built a platform that makes that easy,” he said. “You list your locations so your customers can see exactly where you are on different days of the week, and they can order from those locations and pick up on those days.”

As a regular at the Island's Roots Farmers’ Market that happens from 3-6 p.m. every Wednesday at Beban Park, Fraser said he tries to shop local produce wherever he can.

He said this interest first came from wanting to find ways to combat climate change and seeing how climate change could affect the food supply chain to Vancouver Island.

“I mean, we all lived through COVID and saw what happened, how fragile our supply chains can be. These big industrial beasts that then fall over as soon as somebody gets a boat stuck in a canal or whatever,” he said. “So I think a cool thing about these sorts of local food systems is they're a lot harder to disrupt. If your neighbour down the street is growing potatoes and sharing them with your block or your town and a boat gets stuck in a canal, or a pandemic hits, or whatever, those potatoes are still there.”

Following a recent pilot program in Squamish, Home Grown is now live for buyers and sellers to sign up and use the platform online.

Along with sellers in Squamish, on Vancouver Island, products can now be purchased from producers West Coast Spores in the Cowichan Valley and Glassen Farms in Nanaimo. West Coast Spores sell a variety of kits to grow gourmet mushrooms, while Glassen Farms offers forest pastured pork, grass fed beef, lamb, and a variety of free range poultry products.

Fraser said he also hopes Home Grown also becomes a place to showcase alternative and Indigenous food systems that aren’t normally seen in a typical grocery store.

“Indigenous food systems often go sort of unseen, even though those are the food systems that are most inherent to where we live,” he said. “I think there's a lot of opportunity for people to connect with different types of food and different types of people than they maybe otherwise would connect to.”

Fraser said while the platform is in its early days, and focusing on getting people from Vancouver Island and Squamish involved, he hopes the platform can be used all over the province so everyone can connect with local food hubs.

Funding Note: This story was produced with funding support from the Local Journalism Initiative, administered by the Community Radio Fund of Canada.