The Challenge

The Arcadia Center for Sustainable Food and Agriculture, a local nonprofit dedicated to creating a more equitable and sustainable local food system in the Washington, DC area, operates a Mobile Market that delivers sustainably produced fresh food to underserved communities in the region from two decommissioned school buses.

Teaming with Arcadia, Perigee Labs set out to construct a mobile Point of Sale (POS) system specifically built to support acceptance of assistance programs and integrate with a web hosted inventory control and transaction aggregation application. The goal was to support multiple mobile markets at multiple locations, aggregating all sales transactions and capturing assistance program usage by product category. The result was Farmers Register.

The Solution

Farmers Register is a mobile POS system that improves efficiency, speeds transactions, provides inventory control, and compiles highly desirable farmers market price and customer purchasing data not currently available to public health researchers, the USDA, and traditional retailers. Now in it’s second season as a pilot program, Farmers Register is currently being used by a number of mobile markets nationwide.

Native iPad Application

Built with Apple’s latest Swift language, the app’s register provides an easy-to-use product selection and editing workflow for checkout, incorporating the application of relevant incentive programs for each shopper. The incentive program optimization algorithm enables cashiers and shoppers to easily allocate available program dollars – a task that previous managed completely manually with high margin for error. Sales history and a purchased product summary for past markets is also available with the app. Market locations can also be geocoded into the system to support managers with multiple market sites. Using the iPad’s cellular connection, administrators can download product and configuration information (as setup in the web app), and securely upload sales data when the market closes.

farmersregister.com Web Application

Perigee Labs built a powerful web application, utilizing the Laravel PHP framework, that allows users to configure inventory for sale, select supported incentive programs, and associate business and tax rules. Using a secure RESTful API, the iPads in the field communicate with the web application for both downloading of product inventory data and uploading of completed register transactions. Analytical reporting tools are provided to view sales activity, program usage, products sold, new patron statistics and other valuable views of the transaction data collected. A dashboard displays key summary data to give the user a good pulse of the operation at a glance.