Selling farm produce direct in France: which channel is worth your time

Most of what a French producer finds written about vente directe answers a question they did not ask. Selling at the gate is not the hard part; deciding whether to add a delivered, ordered-in-advance channel is. This page is about that decision: what the law actually requires of an online sale, what the five 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.

Vente directe is a position, not a licence

In European food law your position comes from who you hand the food to. Selling your own production to the person who will eat it — remise directe au consommateur final — is the lightest case there is, and it stays the lightest whether the handover happens at the gate, on a market pitch or through a delivery someone else drives. Article 6 of regulation (EC) 852/2004 requires a food business to be registered with the competent authority; in France that is a declaration to the departmental services, not a permit you apply for and wait on.

Two things make the picture heavier, and both are about the buyer rather than the place. Supplying an intermediary — a shop, a restaurant, a wholesaler — with products of animal origin is where sanitary approval, the agrément, enters the conversation, with a derogation for small quantities delivered locally. And transforming rather than simply harvesting makes you a food business in the fuller sense, with the hygiene plan and the traceability that go with it: jam, cheese, bread and cured products are not in the same class as a crate of your own carrots. Where the thresholds sit differs by product family, and the answer that binds you comes from your own departmental services, not from a guide — ours included.

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 obligations are unchanged: regulation (EU) No 1169/2011 wants the name of the food, the quantity, the date, the operator 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: article L221-28 of the code de la consommation excludes goods liable to deteriorate or expire rapidly, 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 five 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 gate. Costs nothing to open, reaches only the people who already drive past, and interrupts the work whenever someone does.
• Markets. Real footfall and a real relationship, paid for with a Saturday, a drive, a pitch and everything that does not sell by noon.
• Baskets and buying groups. 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, typically at 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. 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 within roughly 35 km of Melun, in the south of Seine-et-Marne, 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 gate, and a shared run is the only version of this that a buyer can afford. It also means 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 stated in 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 separately regulated. We are not promising 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 it is not fixed by the terms.
• 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.

Prepared, not published: how a storefront starts

The contract allows us to prepare a storefront in advance from what a producer has published about itself — name, address, description of activity, range and public contact details. Six farms in the pilot cluster have one already. A storefront prepared that way is not published and not visible to buyers until the producer confirms it, and confirmation means a written yes, not silence: a person publishes it by hand after reading your reply. Before that you can require its deletion, and it is deleted without conditions and without being asked for a reason.

So the first thing you get is a private link to your own page, not an invoice. It carries no advertising instruction to search engines and no buyer can reach it. If the prices, the units or the descriptions are wrong, they are wrong on a page nobody sees, which is the point of sending it before anything goes live.

After publication the same door stays open in the other direction. A request to unpublish is honoured the same day, with no notice period and no penalty: new orders stop at once, and orders already accepted are completed. The thirty days in that section concern ending the contract itself, not keeping a page online, and any change to the terms takes at least thirty days' notice before it applies.

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 village 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 departmental services, and the ones about your 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 our guide to the same subject under Italian rules if you also sell across the border. The map of producers shows who is already on the market.