What Are Reko Circles?

From Finland, where organic farms and customers are far apart and neither CSA nor farmers’ markets ever caught on, comes Reko Circles, a system that may come in handy during this Covid-19 crisis!  This is how it works.  A farmer, or group of farmers, set up a closed Facebook page where you list the products you have available for the week with prices and photos.  You invite regular customers to place their orders with a set deadline.  Then you meet with them in an agreed upon place – a parking lot, a park, any convenient place with enough room for your vehicle and theirs.  In a short timespan, the customers pay you, take their prepacked order and depart. You could even set it up so that customer arrivals are staggered so as not to convene too many people at the same time.

Here is a video where Finnish farmer Thomas Snellman describes the Reko system that has grown in just a few years from two small circles to millions of dollars’ worth of sales from Finnish farms.  His explanation starts at 6.15, though you might want to watch from the beginning to get a sense of who Snellman is.