We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Lisa Riznikove a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Lisa, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s kick things off with talking about how you serve the underserved, because in our view this is one of the most important things the small business community does for society – by serving those who the giant corporations ignore, small business helps create a more inclusive and just world for all of us.

I’ll never forget the day we decided to create Foodocracy. We were considering following our passion in food and creating a product to sell so we went to the Fancy Food Show, the biggest trade of the year. We stood there on a massive convention floor in the Marconi Center in San Francisco looking at thousands of food stalls filled with eager food startups and you know what we realized? It was mostly white men and most controlled by a handful of large corporations. Women and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color), not to mention LGBTQ farmers and creators face systemic racism in everything from funding to education. They lack mentors to walk them through the process of getting started, they lack startup funds, they lack the network that creates opportunities for al those white male faces in the crowd.

We fell in love with all the small, family owned businesses who were making amazing products but struggling to succeed. It crushed us to see industrialized food and factory farming stamping out. We both came from careers in marketing for large Fortune 500 companies so we know first hand the advantages that these enormous multi-national companies have. We knew then that we wanted to make a difference.

As we talked to independent farmers and makers about their biggest issues. They needed help with marketing, and they needed a way to reach new customers and sell their products beyond Amazon. Amazon takes a big chunk of the money and has been known to knock off products that are selling well and then undercut them on price. Other big retailers beat them up on margins and charge them for advertising and marketing, making it too expensive for little guys without deep pockets. So we founded Foodocracy.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

The Foodocracy Group is a mission based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting a more independent and sustainable food system by assisting small scale farmers and small batch producers in creating fair and equitable income opportunities. Our mission is anchored in the fundamental belief that food should be good for the environment, our health and local economies.

We support independent farmers and artisans creating sustainable, locally sourced food that is better for us and the planet. Through outreach, education and our independent marketplace, https://shopfoodocracy.com, we seek to level the playing field with the industrialized food system.

Strengthening independent food systems is the crossroads of environmental, health, and social change. Today, food and agriculture companies are consolidated, and most of the world relies on a few global companies for the growing, processing, distributing and retailing of food. The economic impact of the global food system on local communities, particularly rural communities, is devastating. Strengthening independent systems helps farmers and local food producers make enough money to not just survive but to grow and scale, hiring more workers and boosting local economies.

To help combat the destructive growth of industrialized, factory farms across America’s farmlands, Foodocracy created The Farm Fund to provide direct assistance to small, independent farmers. These “seed grants” will help promote a more independent and sustainable food system in local communities across the US by providing funding to at risk farms that are overlooked by government grants. Just 37% of receive loans from the USDA. Grants will be prioritized for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) and Women farmers. These communities are victims of well-documented government and corporate systemic racism and misogyny. This fund seeks to level that playing field.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

We started by launching our e-commerce store to help promote great independent products that weren’t getting shelf space and national notice. We thought as a couple of marketing girls with big experience behind us this should be easy for us. We forgot that we hadn’t brought our “team” with us. We were without a huge budget, a host of agencies and a staff. We sorely missed all those resources and we started to understand what all these small makers were up against. It was just us. I swore I’d never build a website myself…I’ve now built us 3 of them. I take all the photography, develop recipes, write the copy and we even packed every single box up until not all that long ago. We question our sanity on a near daily basis but just about the time we think it’s too much, we’ll get a lovely note from a farmer or a maker telling us how important our work is. We believe so strongly in our purpose that we’ll never quit Foodocracy. We are so thankful to all of the amazing people who have supported us along the way. The Farm Fund is our dream come true and we are so excited to get getting that out. It’s amazing to see the applications coming in from farmers and to see regular people like you and me donating to help keep our food system independent.

We’d love to hear your thoughts about selling platforms like Amazon/Etsy vs selling on your own site.

We literally started Foodocracy to help small markers avoid the trap of sites like Amazon and Etsy. Although convenient and cheap to get started, you don’t own your customer and I’ve seen so many people get burned by them. It’s heartbreaking to hear a maker tell you how they built up an audience over years of hard work only to have Amazon or Etsy drop them with no warming. Because you don’t have any customer contact information you have no choice but to start over from ground zero. Always own your customers journey! Because we are a non-profit we have a different mission than profit. We can put their brand first.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://shopfoodocracy.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shopfoodocracy/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shopfoodocracy
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxOBpmpBsmcn1gF1ROcQrTA

Image Credits
Brie Chandler, Lisa Riznikove,