Digital entrepreneurship tools and support for women entrepreneurs

Digital entrepreneurship tools and support for women entrepreneurs | Tools für digitales Unternehmertum und Unterstützung für Unternehmerinnen | Инструменти за цифрово предприемачество и подкрепа за жени предприемачи | Alati za digitalno poduzetništvo i podrška poduzetnicama | Ψηφιακά εργαλεία επιχειρηματικότητας και υποστήριξη για γυναίκες επιχειρηματίες | Strumenti di imprenditorialità digitale e sostegno alle donne imprenditrici | Digitālās uzņēmējdarbības rīki un atbalsts sievietēm uzņēmējām | Інструменти цифрового підприємництва та підтримка жінок-підприємців

Co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union

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Theresa Imre

Social media as the basis for a successful company? This is also possible in Austria, as the example of the online supermarket https://www.markta.at/, which focuses on regional products, shows.

The later Markta founder and managing director Theresa Imre actually started with blogging. Together with a friend from elementary school, she started the food blog "Einbrockt und auslöffelt" many years ago.

This food blog then became Markta: In March 2018, a newly conceived platform for regional food was created with the digital farmers' market. Customers can easily and conveniently order a full range of hundreds of regional and seasonal foods as well as household goods online. Today, Markta includes more than 3000 products from about 400 different small and family businesses in the region.

The platform Markta is Austria's first digital farmers' market that brings together regional food producers and direct marketers with people who are looking for high-quality and regional products. The full range is sourced exclusively from regional small and family businesses – orders are processed at the Markta logistics centre in Vienna so that the entire order reaches customers at once and in just one package; in addition, there is the first Markta pick-up point in the federal capital.

Nevertheless, the founder is not only concerned with the rediscovery of regionality and sustainability in purchasing, but also with controversial topics such as logistics, the problem of social dependencies in agricultural production – keyword harvest helpers – and ultimately about who earns from our food – and how much. Because today, a few big players such as retail chains and corporations determine what ends up on our plates every day, Imre is convinced. The variety and quality of food suffers as a result, and more and more small producers and farmers are closing their businesses, as Imre emphasizes – around 2,500 farms disappear forever in Austria every year.

To change that Markta is building an alternative to the supermarket and global food trade to give everyone access to quality food from the region. "What is needed is a food system that re-anchors economic structures locally and breaks up and distributes the market power of individual players – from seed companies and processing industries to trade. So that the added value remains directly on the farm and you can adapt flexibly to the local environmental conditions and the changing climate."

The pandemic gave Markta a boost: orders exploded from around 150 to more than 2,500 per week, delivery was extended to the whole of Austria, and there were two crowd-investing rounds to roll out the logistics concept even more regionally via other locations. The founder is also constantly expanding her network in the agricultural and food sector as well as in the academic-political field – as aspiring female entrepreneurs should do.