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Good Neighbor Podcast: Auburn and Opelika
With her genuinely good heart and a wealth of experience behind her, Susannah works to connect local business and non-profit leaders to their neighbors. In a community like ours in which so many have invested their lives, there are fantastic stories all around us that motivate and inspire, often right next door. She hopes to share some of those here, on the Good Neighbor Podcast. Book an interview today at GNPAuburn.com
Good Neighbor Podcast: Auburn and Opelika
Ep.#70: The Online Farmers Market Connecting Auburn's Community
Moises Gonzalez shares how he created FarmHub, an online farmers market delivering fresh, locally-sourced products from over 20 farms directly to Auburn and Opelika residents within 24 hours of harvest.
• Started as a mathematics student at Auburn University researching food access
• Currently offers over 100 products including eggs, milk, meat, vegetables, honey, flowers, and more
• Weekly delivery system where orders are placed by Thursday noon and delivered Saturday
• Provides transparency about farming practices and direct farmer-to-consumer relationships
• Challenging misconceptions that local food is necessarily expensive or always certified organic
• Building infrastructure to fix the "broken" local food system by connecting farmers with consumers
• Recently launched CSA subscription program for regular grocery essentials
Visit farmhub.online or text 786-824-1479 to learn more about FarmHub's services and delivery options.
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, susanna Hodges.
Speaker 2:Welcome With me today is Moises Gonzalez. He is the owner and creator of Farm Hub. Welcome, Moises.
Speaker 3:Hi. Thank you for the opportunity.
Speaker 2:Well, tell me about Farm Hub what do you do? And tell me a little bit about your journey, how you started this.
Speaker 3:Sure, definitely yeah. So FarmHub, it's an online farmers market and we deliver fresh and locally sourced products directly from local farms to our community here in Auburn, opelika, and our mission is to make it convenient for people to access this high quality local food while they are supporting small farms at the same time. And all this started like in the university. I'm a student there and I was doing a research and to understand how people relate to the farmers, and then I made a post on Facebook that was happening on the Opelika group, with a survey about hey, do you?
Speaker 3:buy from your local farms. And why you don't do it, or what do you do?
Speaker 3:I want to understand the behavior of the community, and then I realized a lot of people wanted fresh and local food, but it was inconvenient to get Like going to the farm or going to farmer's market. Sometimes it wasn't really good for the schedule. So I was like, wait, if I made it, made it convenient for people to buy the fresh and local, then maybe they'll do it. And I started with x. I created a website with the help of my brother a designer at all and started calling farmers and I'm a mathematics student, so it was hard because everyone was like who are you?
Speaker 2:So you go to Auburn University. Right, you're a student at Auburn University. Okay, I go to Auburn.
Speaker 3:University and it was super funny because it was calling farmers hey, do you want to sell something? I was starting with X. Do you want to sell something? I was starting with eggs. You want to sell your eggs, you want?
Speaker 2:to sell your eggs, uh-huh.
Speaker 3:Finally, a farmer said yes, I was like yay, I put those eggs there. And someone made an order, and then another order, another order, and then I started looking for more products. And yeah, that's how Farmer was born.
Speaker 2:So you started with eggs and now you have a variety of farm products for people to buy, and they purchase it online. Is that?
Speaker 3:correct.
Speaker 2:So what is your website address?
Speaker 3:So it's farmhubonline.
Speaker 2:Okay, farmhubonline, and you can see the products and order them there.
Speaker 3:Now we have more than a hundred products and more than 20 farmers, so you order it and then it gets delivered.
Speaker 2:How do you deliver it?
Speaker 3:So it's weekly. You make your order through the week until Thursday 12pm so that Thursday 12pm I tell the farmers what they need for that week. Then on Fridays I do pickups at the farm, so we meet up at a point and on Saturday mornings and noon we're doing the delivery. So you are getting the food within 24 hours from harvest or taken from the farm and it's every.
Speaker 2:Saturday delivering and it's, uh, obviously all local. So what are the areas you serve?
Speaker 3:So delivering is only in Auburn or Pelica. Okay, but we take from farms, even from Pike Road, tallahassee. The dairy in Tallahassee we bring over there. So but for delivering we do in Auburn or Playa, or I have some people that they don't live in the area but you can do pickups. Uh, I'm always at Lowe's from 10 am to 11 am so you can just go place your order. Doesn't matter if you don't live here in the area, but you can go and pick up so when are you at Lowe's?
Speaker 2:what, what?
Speaker 3:day Every Saturday from 10 am to 11 am.
Speaker 2:So Lowe's every Saturday 10 to 11. And you can pick up food there or you order food there.
Speaker 3:You order online.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:And then you say you want to pick it up.
Speaker 2:Okay, I got it. Okay, so you order it online and you can pick it up at Lowe's on Saturdays. Okay, all right. Well, what are some of the things you can buy?
Speaker 3:besides eggs. We know that, yeah, so you can buy milk, you can buy meat, you can buy vegetables. We're adding our roots, some roots from produce like uh, beets, sweet potatoes, red potatoes, you can buy honey, you can buy jellies. You can buy flowers. You can buy honey, you can buy jellies, you can buy flowers, you can buy pecans. There's many products. What we're trying to build here is your local grocery, your local farms.
Speaker 2:So it's all I'm assuming. It's all organic right If it's from locally grown right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so that's actually a myth. Sometimes people think that if it's local, it's going to be organic, like certified organic and what I always try to explain to people, because I learned this from the farmer. So organic certified, that's our certification, and many small farms they don't have the money or the time to go through all that.
Speaker 2:Process.
Speaker 3:yeah, farms, they don't have the money or the time to go through all that process. Yeah, they have sustainable practices and many of them have organic grown uh practices. But it doesn't mean that it's organic certified. But that's why I say uh, platforms like farmhub, that gives that connection to the farmer. You can it's it's very transparent so you can see the the practices of that farmer. You can contact the farmer, you can ask questions and the way you know about the food you're eating, like you have access to that person, that farmer. But it doesn't mean it's not necessarily to be organic certified.
Speaker 2:So that's one of the misconceptions you've come across. Are there any other misconceptions people have about this type of shopping?
Speaker 3:yeah, definitely. Uh, there's many things I'm still learning. One thing that I realized is that maybe say if it's local, it's going to be super expensive. Uh, there's no way I can afford it. So I go to the low prices at the supermarkets. But actually local farms can be very competitive, even more if you are in a seasonal produce when, like we have tomatoes or something that are in season. Those prices are very competitive with the grocery store. So it's not that expensive and, in addition, you have a great value that is fresh and it's local and you're supporting your own economy.
Speaker 3:It's not like you're sending the money out there to places that you don't even know the farmer, you're having good quality, great value and at the same time, you are investing in your community.
Speaker 2:So let's shift a little bit here. Tell me a little bit about you, Moises. What do you do for fun when you're not delivering and providing fresh food for people?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I don't have a lot of free time with balancing school and business, but I do try to do my best to have fun. So after sundays, after jerseys, on sundays I go to play football soccer with uh friends. Uh, I also like to play video games to relax. Sometimes, uh, rick like a rick yeah listen to a lot of podcasts when I'm driving oh yeah, that's always here to relax when I'm driving.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, that's always to relax, to, to it's for fun. But yeah, and I also enjoy the business. But I try to do some sport or go to the gym. I love volleyball but I haven't found the time to to go and play volleyball, but that's one of my favorites.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Well, you know, part of the reason I do this podcast is to encourage others to be entrepreneurs, whether you're doing it full-time or part-time, finding something to do for yourself, a business like this. So I like to encourage others so they can hear your journey into entrepreneurship. Did you have any kind of hardships starting this business, either personal or just in the business that you overcame? That made you as a person stronger and your business stronger.
Speaker 3:Well, there's something like there's a couple of stuff, but once that is, it didn't happen exactly. On the business, but it uh like in my life I'm coming from cuba and like there's. No, it wouldn't be possible to create a business in like, uh like this in cuba, because of the government regulations and and having that experience and coming here to the us, where you have, like, the freedom to create something, and then you see that there is results when you do hard work, then that gives me the motivation to say, hey, if I am the right place in the right time and I do hard work, then I'll see the results.
Speaker 3:so I'm always like it's, it's possible, like you're free to do your free to do your research, you have resources here, you have connections and yeah, and always like take advantage of the community. I think the community here in Auburn of Laika is awesome.
Speaker 2:I agree it is.
Speaker 3:It's very business is not easy, but the community make it very business friendly and supportive. They support a lot of people.
Speaker 2:Absolutely Well. What's one thing you wish people knew about FarmHub that they may not realize?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so right now, what we'll use on FarmHub is just a website. You go there and you have your farmers market grocery store, let's say. But the idea with Pharma is to create a distribution system. We're trying to fix this food system in the local view. People are saying a lot that the local food system is broken, it doesn't work, and sometimes they even say farmers are not enough to feed their communities. But what I've realized, what I'm learning, is that we do have farmers. The problem is not the farmers, the problem is the infrastructure.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So about FarmHub, I'll say we're going to fix this problem. We're trying to create the infrastructure where farmers can commerce in their own area and restaurants have access to all these farmers and people, families have access to the farmers, so it's not only about selling and buying food.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:It's more a whole movement.
Speaker 2:Trying to get all the people of all over the world to eat. Yeah, community. Well, how can people learn more? We talked about your website, farmhubonline. Is there any other way people can get in touch with you?
Speaker 3:Yeah, definitely. So they can text me at info at farmhubonline or they can just go to Instagram. It's at farmhub Slash AO.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 3:Or they can just type farmhub in Facebook or LinkedIn. They can contact through there. Or just my business number is 786-824-1479. 786-824-1479. 786-824-1479. And just text me or call me if you have any questions. And more now, like we're starting a CSA program, it's a subscription that you can buy. You can get that subscription. You get either a big box with all your grocery essentials or the regular CSA that people are used to buy, that the community supports back over, and we're working on that so you can get a lot of value from items that you will buy at the grocery store.
Speaker 3:You'll get it to your house because if you want a mango, sure, go to Walmart, but if you want something that grows in your community, like something like eggs or tomatoes, just go and buy it in your community. Why find a grocery store if you have someone struggling to make a living here and they can provide the same product?
Speaker 2:And probably better, and probably better. Yep. Well, thank you so much for being with me today, moises. I have enjoyed talking to you and learning about what you've started here in Auburn in Obelika.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much. Thank you for doing.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the good neighbor podcast Auburn. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to gnpauburn. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to gnpauburncom. That's gnpauburncom, or call 334-429-7404.