Selling your farm produce direct in Poland

Most of what a Polish farmer reads about selling direct answers a question they did not ask. Selling at the gate or the local market is not the hard part; deciding whether to add a delivered, ordered-in-advance channel is. This page is about that decision — what Polish and EU law actually require of an online sale, what the channels cost you in time rather than in money, and, in the second half, precisely what our pilot offers, in the words of the contract, including the two categories it will not carry.

Direct sale is a position, not a licence

In food law your position comes from who you hand the food to. Selling your own production to the person who will eat it is the lightest case there is, and it stays the lightest whether the handover happens at the farm, on a market stall or through a delivery someone else drives. In Poland this is rolniczy handel detaliczny (RHD) — farm retail — and it is a registration, not a permit you apply for and wait on: plant food is registered with the sanitary inspection (sanepid), food of animal origin with the veterinary inspection, before you start.

Two things make the picture heavier, and both are about the product rather than the place. Food of animal origin — eggs, honey, dairy — carries sanitary rules of its own, and transforming rather than simply harvesting makes you a food business in the fuller sense, with the hygiene and traceability that go with it: cheese, bread, jam and smoked products are not in the same class as a crate of your own carrots. One figure worth knowing: income from RHD is exempt from income tax up to 100,000 zł a year, and the VAT registration threshold rose to 240,000 zł in 2026 — but the answer that binds you comes from your own inspectorate and an accountant who works with farms, not from a guide, ours included.

The easier half of the picture in 2026: sales to the final consumer carry no quantity or territorial limit at all. The limits that still exist apply to supplies to shops and restaurants, which is a different channel from the one on this page.

What selling online changes, and what it does not

Very little of the above moves when an order arrives by internet instead of by car. Your sanitary status is unchanged. Your labelling duties are unchanged: regulation (EU) No 1169/2011 wants the name of the food, the quantity, the date, the producer behind it and, first of all, the allergens.

What is added is distance-selling law, because the buyer is now a consumer who has not seen the goods. You owe them clear information before they pay — what it is, what it weighs, what it costs, who is selling it. In exchange, the fourteen-day right of withdrawal does not describe your catalogue: the consumer-rights act excludes goods that spoil quickly or have a short shelf life, which is fresh food by definition. Read that exemption narrowly. It removes the change of mind, not the responsibility: an order that arrives damaged, short or not at all is still yours to answer for.

The channels, and what each one really costs

They are not equivalent, and the difference is rarely the margin. It is what each one takes out of your week.

• The farm gate. Costs nothing to open, reaches only those who already drive past, and interrupts the work whenever someone arrives.
• Markets. Real footfall and a real relationship, paid for with a Saturday, the drive, the stall fee and everything that does not sell by noon.
• Baskets and co-ops. Regular volume and committed customers, in exchange for delivering to somebody else's rhythm, in their sizes, all season.
• Shops and restaurants. Quantity, on an invoice, usually paid in thirty to sixty days — and a kitchen buys what you promised for Thursday, not what happens to be ready.
• Your own online shop. The whole margin and the whole job: traffic, photographs, payments, complaints, couriers and the evening you spend on them.
• A marketplace. It starts from demand that already exists and takes a commission for it. Your part is the product and the stock; the storefront, the buyer and the courier are somebody else's problem.

That last line is us, so read the rest knowing exactly where it comes from.

What the pilot actually is

GetEats is a marketplace of named producers. Each has their own storefront, sets their own prices and packs their own orders; we are the shop window, the checkout and the delivery, and we never buy your crop to resell it under another name.

The pilot is deliberately narrow: a cluster of farms around Kraków, so that one run can collect from several farms on the same afternoon. That is arithmetic rather than modesty. A commission on one household basket cannot pay for a vehicle sent to a single farm, and a shared run is the only version of this a buyer can afford. So the honest question for your farm is not whether the platform works, but whether there are buyers near you yet.

Two categories the pilot does not accept at all: meat and alcohol. The reason is written into the contract rather than left to a conversation — delivery is by courier, with no cold chain and no meat-labelling process, and distance selling of alcohol is regulated separately. We do not promise fish either, for the same cold-chain reason. The rest of a range can be listed, and these are added when the logistics and the paperwork allow it.

The commercial terms, as the contract states them

Everything in this list is in the partner terms, and nothing that is not in them is promised here:

• Commission: 5% of the order value, excluding the cost of delivery.
• Payment: to your bank account within 15 days of confirmed delivery, together with a statement for the period.
• You are the seller. The operator is not the seller of the goods and does not take title to them: the contract with the buyer is yours, which is why you set the price and answer for the product.
• The price shown is final to the buyer, and you are responsible for composition, weight, shelf life, origin and allergen information.
• Stock is yours to keep current, updated at least once a day, so that nothing is sold that you cannot pack.
• Delivery is arranged by us through a logistics partner; its price is calculated when the order is placed and shown to the buyer, and the terms do not fix it.
• No exclusivity. The gate, the market, the shops you already supply and your own site keep working, and we do not restrict what you charge elsewhere.

A public profile is not a sale

The contract allows us to prepare a profile of a farm in advance from what it has published about itself — name, area, description of activity, range and public contact details — and to show it as a public listing. Such a profile presents the farm but takes no orders: there is no cart, it is marked as a listing that names the source of its information, and it is not advertised to search engines. It becomes a selling storefront only when you activate it, and publishing a profile is not your acceptance of anything.

You stay in control of it from the first day. A link in the notice lets you correct it, claim it or remove it entirely — removal is honoured the same day, with no notice period and no reason asked. If some of what we published about you is wrong, it is wrong on a page that sells nothing, which is the point of showing it before anything goes live.

What we cannot promise you yet

Three things, because a producer deciding this deserves the unflattering half too. Card payment is not yet live on the site: during the pilot we arrange payment with the buyer directly, which is the part of the flow we are still building. Volume is not something we can quote you — the cluster is new, and anyone naming a number of buyers for your area would be inventing it. And the contract is governed by the law of Georgia, where the operator is registered; for a partner established in the European Union that does not remove the protection of the mandatory rules of its own country.

None of this page is legal, sanitary or tax advice. The questions about your own thresholds belong to your sanitary or veterinary inspectorate, and the ones about your tax regime to an accountant who works with farms.

If you want to test the channel

The page for producers sets out what joining involves and links to the partner terms in full — worth ten minutes before anything else, because it is the document, not this article, that binds either of us. Then write to us with what you make, in what quantities and on which days: for a farm outside the cluster, that reply is the honest place to hear whether we can reach you yet.

Two more pages are useful before you price anything: how buying direct looks from the customer's side, which is in the end what you are selling, and the same guide written for French and Italian rules if you also sell across a border. The map of producers shows who is already on the market.