Hi my name is Lais McCartney and I'm with Hancock County extension, I'm the Purdue Agriculture and
Natural Resources educator and I wanted to show you how to use Foodlink as a producer
to help you to market your product. So I'm going to look up Purdue Foodlink in my search engine,
and it takes you to the website. Foodlink is a USDA grant that was given to Purdue Extension to
promote the produce in Indiana and throughout the midwest to help producers, as well as consumers,
to be connected and this video is focused on producers, and what you can use this for (for
free) to market your products. So in the front page it just basically is interesting, it shows
featured fruits in a "Did you Know" section. And where it will be helpful for you is to go
to producers (tab) there's marketing materials and there are produce signs. So for instance,
let's look at watermelon. Basically the QR code would take them to this section right here.
This could be sorted from A to Z. I'm going to go (from) Z to A so we can find watermelon. I want to
show you what it looks like to look at a QR code with your phone. I put it (my phone camera) over
the watermelon QR code and it popped up the website. I clicked the website
and it takes me directly to the website page all about watermelons that we just saw on the website
itself. But this is on a phone. This is an iPhone. It has the recipes and what's interesting is
consumers can learn how to store things and all kinds of information. And you just have to have
one QR code you may not even have to print anything. That QR code will take them to
this watermelon page where it talks about how to find a good watermelon, look for a yellowish spot
where the watermelon rests on the ground, pick a symmetrical melon that seems heavy for its size,
nutritional information, what is good to pair with, some fun quick facts, the types
of watermelon that's around, how long it can be stored, and here's some recipes. So some ideas
for a producer can be to use this information that is available to you on those on that website
to promote it on like Facebook or your social media. So for instance, right now April 13th,
asparagus might be coming up and you may want to be selling some asparagus and you could make a
social media post about asparagus. So for instance you could copy this post and I'm
going to move my Foodlink page, and I'm going to look at my (Facebook county) extension
page. So you go into "publish post". You can actually make some scheduled posts
when you have time so you can create a post and you can paste that link for asparagus.
You can even copy this picture right-click to save the image and I'm going to call it asparagus.
And so it's a great idea to add this photo, so I'm going to add that photo. You can use these
photos on the website, "Watch for our asparagus in next week's market offering." You can say when
you want it to be posted; let's say you want to be posted in a week and you want them to know
before the market. So let's say you want (post) on Friday so (consumers) they could see it at 10 54
a.m on Friday when they're still at work and look forward to tomorrow's farmers market. So that's a
way you can use your Facebook (or other social media) and also your Foodlink. So to get a read
just a Foodlink QR code that anyone can go to you can just basically have this one print out
and it will take them to the Foodlink website with their phone QR reader or they can just use their
camera which will take them to this website. That way they can search for the correct
item that they want and you don't have to have QR codes on each individual item and another
really great way to promote your product is recipe cards. You can find your produce, let's say you're
bringing out some apples and you want to have some recipes for people to be able to
pick up. There (are) a few options for apples but this one tells specifically about the apple
and on the back, it gives you a crunchy chicken salad recipe with all the important information
and the QR code to the recipe. So they don't maybe have to have this (printed out) they
could just have it on their phone. You can just print this (recipe card) from your computer
and it'll just print four little recipe cards. Pretty cute and convenient. You can share this
link so you have a single one and you can just share it on your social media by copying this
link and putting it back into your Facebook page just like we did earlier. You can make a post
and you can just put it in a scheduled post. Let us know if you have any questions and we hope that
Foodlink is helpful to you as you promote your products and sell it this spring. Thank you!