Today I'm talking with Brecca at REKO- Local Food Community. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Brecca at REKO Local Food Community. Good afternoon, Brecca. It's one o'clock in the afternoon. I don't know where I was. Hello. Nice to be with you. You too. How are you? 00:26 I'm doing so well, thanks. We're trying to stay warm over here in my neck of the woods, but from listening to some of your previous podcasts, we're not that cold. So we hit two degrees this morning, and I was thinking I was not having a good day, but then I heard negative 25, and I was like, I'm OK. I'm OK. Well, it's really funny, because they're predicting rain for this afternoon here. It's like 35 degrees today. Oh my goodness, yeah. No fun. 00:52 It would be really, really nice if the weather would reflect what month we're actually in. Wouldn't it? That's true. My husband and I were talking in last year in January is when we got all our snow. So we didn't have snow all winter last year till January came and that's when we got pelted. And this year's been similar. We haven't been pelted with snow, but the temperatures are super cold. So I'm like, I'm ready to kind of start breaking into spring, not have the winter. 01:23 It's not that far away. We are rolling into February here soon. So there's hope. And I feel like all I do is talk about the weather at the beginning of every podcast episode. But like I've said, it's how I express my care for who I'm talking to. So well, when you're talking homesteading weather, that's what we're all thinking about. Exactly. Yeah. All right. So tell me about yourself and about RICO and what does REKO stand for? It's R-E-K-O. Yeah. So 01:50 REKO is actually a Swedish acronym that was put out by a Finnish farmer, and it just means fair consumption. So REKO itself here in Idaho started in 2020 around COVID craziness. So we had farmers markets that were threatening not to open because they couldn't meet the demands of city authorities and health authorities. 02:19 We had restaurants that were closed down. And for all of our small producers here in Idaho, those were two of the biggest cells for their farms and their homesteads was restaurants and farmers markets. And so we had Tia Groves with... 02:40 They no longer run it, but they sold mushrooms at the time. And she actually started Rico here locally as a collaboration of producers to create a way to continue to sell our goods because we were still producing them, but we just lost all of our avenues of selling them during 2020. 03:01 Okay, that makes a lot of sense. Did I see that it doesn't cost money to be part of it on your website or did I misread that? So actually, so there's two different parts of Rico. There's Rico the app, which is a great resource that has been produced by a couple of tech guys out of Utah and we just teamed up with them. 03:27 to be able to use the app, but the app is created with the producer in mind. So it is absolutely free for the producer. There's no cost. It is a storefront. So it's a great way to have a website that you can use that storefront of REKO through the app or if they're on a computer it goes through a website and 03:54 Sorry, my computer just notified me it's low. So anyways, but either way we can go, the producers aren't paying for it. There is a small fee that's asked from the customer at checkout and that's how the app is paid for. So we have a lot of producers here that have really taken advantage of that and created websites with that. 04:22 with REKO built in as the purchasing power for their website. So it saves our producers money on fees. It saves our producers money on having a storefront that's online, right? Because I know for our particular business, we have our own website and we set it up with WooCommerce years before REKO app was ever available. And we pay a lot of money for that every year. So 04:50 It is REKO. The app is definitely set up with producers in mind and it is a free tool for producers when that is When we talk about the farmers when we talk about the farmers market here in Idaho We have created a collaboration of vendors that have come together as REKO Treasure Valley And we actually created a farmers market out of it. So it's an online farmers market 05:17 We do charge, if you were to participate in all eight locations, it is $30 a month. So it's still very affordable. That $30 a month that we all pitch in goes to advertising the farmers market. So that's literally the only thing it pays for, but it's been a great resource for us as ...
