What buyers search for on Coop and can't find (hint: it isn't bread)

Every week I look at two lists side by side. One is what sellers put up on Coop. The other is what buyers type into the search box. You'd think they'd match pretty closely, and they don't!

Sellers on Coop are mostly bakers. Buyers, a lot of the time, are looking for a farm.

The numbers

Here's one week in early October. Buyers ran about 1,500 searches in the app. The single most searched word was "eggs", and it wasn't close. Here's how the top food searches stacked up against what's actually listed on Coop:

Sourdough has almost three times as many listings as eggs and got less than a third of the searches. Put another way, a dozen eggs on Coop has something like nine times as many people looking for it as a loaf of sourdough does. Meat and honey are in the same spot, just smaller.

And it isn't only a Coop thing. Over the last three months Bing counted about 1,100 searches for "local honey near me" and almost 500 for "grass fed beef near me". That's more than "sourdough bread near me" got in the same stretch.

Where it shows up

When we have enough local sellers of something in a city, Coop gives it its own page, like farm fresh eggs near St. Louis. The bar is five listings from at least three different sellers. Sourdough clears it in 69 metro areas. Eggs clear it in 57.

Honey clears it in zero. Meat clears it in zero. Beef clears it in one (Chicago).

That's not because nobody sells them. It's because the people who do are spread thin, one or two to a city. A few examples from the near index this week:

• Springfield has 14 meat listings from just 2 sellers. One more rancher and it gets a page.
• Syracuse has 18 meat listings, all from a single seller.
• Tacoma has 8 honey listings from 2 beekeepers.

Across the country, about one "meat" search in six comes back with nothing nearby at all. For eggs it's about one in eight. Those are people who opened the app ready to buy and left without anything.

Who could fill it

If you keep a few laying hens, a couple of hives, or raise a steer or two a year, you might be closer to a Coop storefront than you think. And honestly, you'd be walking into a much less crowded room than the bakers are.

The catch is that eggs, meat and honey each have their own rules, and they aren't the cottage food rules most of our bakers use.

Eggs usually fall under the state's egg law, not the cottage food law. A few of the states we've written guides for have a path for small flocks. Texas says you don't need a license to sell ungraded eggs from your own flock to the end user. Missouri has an exception for people selling only their own flock's eggs, as long as it's not at an established place of business away from the farm. Oklahoma points to a fact sheet saying direct sales from where the hens are kept don't need a license. Florida runs small flocks through a separate permit program. Our post on selling eggs from home goes deeper.

Meat is the big one. It's left out of the cottage food law in Texas, Missouri, Florida and Oklahoma, and it falls under meat and poultry inspection rules instead. If you already sell beef or pork by the cut or the share, you probably know how that works where you are. If you don't, start with your state agriculture department before you list anything. When you're ready, our lesson on ingredients, allergens and meat shows how to set up the listing.

Honey has its own post: can you sell honey from home.

A few things that help farm sellers

These come from watching what works for the sellers who are already doing it.

• Say how much you have. Eggs come in at the hens' pace, not yours. Listing a weekly count (and letting it sell out) keeps you from promising cartons you don't have. Here's how to say how much you have and when.
• Pick a pickup day. One regular day a week turns first-time buyers into regulars who just show up. Our lesson on setting a pickup rhythm walks through it.
• Use the words people search. Buyers type "eggs", "meat" and "honey". A listing called "Farm fresh eggs" or "Raw local honey" gets found. A clever name nobody searches for doesn't.
• List the whole range. A buyer searching "meat" in your town is happy to find ground beef, a half share, or a whole chicken. Each one is its own listing, and each one is another way to be found.

Want to try it?

If you've got eggs on the counter or honey in the pantry and your neighbors keep asking, open a storefront on Coop and see who's looking near you. It's free to start, and publishing your first listing takes a few minutes. And if you're a buyer who's been searching for eggs, start with farm fresh eggs near Dallas or St. Louis, or search your own town in the app.

This is general information, not legal advice. Egg, meat and honey rules vary by state and sometimes by county, so confirm with your state agriculture or health department before you sell.

Cole Coleman, founder of Coop