Building Finland's foraged marketplace

# Transcript Episode 1 of the Trusted Cofounder Podcast with Risto Holappa, founder of Willit, a marketplace for Finland's foraged, fished, and hunted produce. Recorded May 2026. Speakers are inferred from context; minor filler ("yeah", "kind of", "like") has been trimmed for readability. Finnish terms (Jokaisen oikeus, Ylikiiminki, lähikala, saalis.net, Kainuu, Kemijärvi) preserved. --- ## Jason Welcome to the Cofounders Podcast. ## Risto Nice to be here. ## Jason I'm joined today with Risto. He's coming from a company called Willit. I'm Jason, one of the cofounders of Trusted Cofounder. Let's keep this loose, this is our first podcast, so I appreciate you being willing to do this. Let's start with your company. How did you start it? What's it all about? ## Risto Good to be here. My name is Risto, and I founded Willit last October. This was 2025. One way to say it: it's about champions for local natural food and produce. What Willit is, it's the next-generation marketplace for anything that can be foraged or fished or hunted here in Finland. ## Jason So by foraged, fished, you mean berries, wild game, that kind of stuff? ## Risto Yes, anything that is wild in the sense of wild forest berries and wild herbs, or game, or fish. Because here in Finland there's the Jokaisen oikeus, every man's right, that anyone can fish and get the berries and herbs. The idea is that I want to make a marketplace for this kind of produce available for a larger audience. ## Jason So you're the transition between "I've picked some berries" or "I'm starting to pick lots of berries, I really enjoy it, and maybe I could find a way to make money with those." Is that it? ## Risto That is the main idea behind it. I first thought of it because in my family there's a profession of fisherman, and there was no issue with the direct sales as such, but there were no proper sales channels. It was always word of mouth. There were some possibilities to use Facebook marketplace or some other messaging apps, but no good way to do it professionally. So my first idea was to support these professional fishermen. Then it grew to the hunting / game side, and also the berries and herbs side. ## Jason So it started with fish because of your family line, your father, I'm guessing. ## Risto My father, yes. He passed about 15 years ago. He was very… I'm from Ylikiiminki, that's near Oulu. We have a lot of good berry picking places, but no fish there. So we knew how to get berries and herbs and sell those, but it was very small amounts. ## Jason So you have an interesting balance to keep. You have very small producers, or harvesters, and they have to transition to finding people willing to buy that product. You mentioned Facebook marketplace, that's the first thought that comes to mind. What does your product do differently than Facebook marketplace? And how does the conversation go in terms of the business? ## Risto The business side is that we make the platform focused on actually making the selling easier and possible at various levels. Connecting the berry pickers and fishermen with businesses, like restaurants, and with individual customers who want to buy this kind of produce. One place to get it. They can get it much easier. ## Jason Is there bureaucracy involved that you help automate? ## Risto Yes. The food authority part is strict. ## Jason If I catch a fish, does it have any regulations? ## Risto A lot of regulation, especially on the fish side. We want to support especially the professional fishermen and what they're allowed to do. But the every man's right also recommends some things on the fishing side. Also, game meat is very difficult to sell because it's not allowed to sell on Facebook in the normal way. People try to circulate around it. They have game meat they want to sell, they take a picture of the paper that has the information about the game meat and post the image to Facebook. Then it doesn't go to the algorithm. ## Jason Right. It's just an image, not actual text. So you're helping a lot with not just the transactions or the bureaucracy. It's actual data, making sure the marketing is done properly, that the messages are getting to the right people. ## Risto Yes. Especially on the food authority side, we want to make sure that whoever buys or sells does it with the law included. We have the ways to do it with professionality. The income goes directly to the producer in that sense, we only take the commission to handle the business side. ## Jason Now, you started this back in October last year. And when you started, you focused on fish, is that right? ## Risto The fishing side happened about one year ago. ## Jason Oh, so even before you had a company officially. ## Risto The fishing, I had this lähikala (near-fish). I made it mainly for my father-in-law who has no presence on the internet. He sells fish. I noticed that there are difficulties with fresh produce. It has to get the buyers quickly. ## Jason The fish will go bad, right? ## Risto Yes. We can freeze the fish, but it's not a good way to do it. We want the fish to go as soon as possible to the buyers. I even heard that if you repackage or freeze fish or wildlife, or even berries, there are more regulations on top of that as well. ## Risto That is also included. And it's motivated. For our future, what kind of produce we want to consume as a person or as a restaurant, it has to be as fresh as possible. That is my goal here also. ## Jason I think having it as fresh as possible is something restaurants are going to want, but it also helps you simplify things, because you don't have to worry about freezing and preservation. You're not dealing with those complications. It makes it easier. You started with some fish even before you had an official company. I always think it's great when a company tries to find its customer before they make a company. The other way around is a bit silly. From fish, did you move to berries, or what was your next customer? ## Risto Next customer was game meat. Speciality, moose meat. I've been hunting moose for over ten years and getting at least one moose per year with my hunting club. I've seen in my network a growing want for game meat. I saw a possibility to include this with the fish website I'd made. So I bought saalis.net. I tested with that also, does this get traction. I said I had this idea, I can help find hunters or people who have game meat available, and we can provide this service. ## Jason So the idea sprang out of your own demand. You realised you've got all this moose meat, you'd like to sell it or at least use it up. ## Risto I also have friends who are hunters with freezers full of game meat. The game meat market is very difficult, because there are no markets available. It's always done with hunters and family of hunters, that's where the meat goes. I noticed there's higher demand for it, but the business side for only doing fish and game meat is not enough. So I didn't start the company yet. After playing with this, with my network, my family, my thoughts, I wanted to make this more than just fish and game meat. So I included berries, herbs, and other. ## Jason Mushrooms, I guess. ## Risto Mushrooms. Natural produce, and also local small producers, including the farming side. But when I talked with farmers, they said they had seen direct-sales platforms previously. There were similarities to farm-to-table services done 10 years ago, no one has done it at good scale in a way that's been very local. Some have failed. I even know places that have this challenge: they have a restaurant and they want to do farm-to-table. It's so difficult that they find it easier to buy their own fields or grow their own crops to make this happen. ## Jason So your tool helps automate that part, making it happen. ## Risto I think so. We first make the marketplace so that the user experience is very easy. Easy to list your produce, get the payment going on, get noticed by the markets. We handle the outreach for these small producers. The marketing and SEO and making it accessible. We're also testing automation that includes AI, in the sense that we take natural language. For example, we have a piloting base coming up for the business side, where restaurants or chefs can just say "I want 10 kilos of mushrooms, as fresh as possible." No forms, just a sentence. The AI makes enquiries to various places, can they produce this kind of mushroom at this scale. If not from one producer, it picks from various places and calculates how much it's going to cost. It transmits the results back to the buyer. ## Jason If you think of your stakeholders, you have the producers, then you have the restaurants or demand on the other side, and you're the one gluing those two together. What kind of challenges have you found doing that, and what have you learned playing around in that area? ## Risto It's a technical platform side. We have to make it firstly very user-friendly and easy to understand. Especially in this natural-produce field, there are a lot of people who are not technically strong. ## Jason It's not what they do every day. ## Risto Right. And, briefly, you're coming from a programming background. That's the mindset, that this has to be very easy to use. I've been making the producer's flow: how can this be possible? Firstly list the produce, then handle all kinds of orders. ## Jason Was it even a challenge to get people to sign on or register? Do you do that for them? ## Risto No. I was thinking we did it well with the platform that we haven't done this kind of onboarding for them in any way. I've heard other people do. ## Jason A lot of hand-holding kind of thing. ## Risto They come to the producer and say "I can list your meat here, you can send it." That's what I imagined actually. ## Jason So how did you change? What was your approach? ## Risto My approach is to make the marketplace as easy to use as possible so that I don't have to do any manual work. It's easy enough for them to handle it all by themselves. ## Jason So they just take a quick picture, tell how many kilos, that's it? ## Risto When I first drafted this, I had to check how Tori.fi or Vinted do it. I had to make sure it's a similar experience, because I know that in Finland various people are now trying Vinted for example. They know how to make it. The main point is the picture and just headline, category, and price. Nothing else is mandatory. Other things are optional. We try to send it so that you get to list yours, then we can send you a notification: success for that. Can you still add an English variation for that? ## Jason Get the information in flying fast and then fill it in later with some more stuff. ## Risto Getting in small steps. Because if we want, take the form, for example: if we blast it away for the user right away with food authority stuff that has to be done, some people do it manually, but if they're missing some, we just inform that they are still missing. Can you edit them, because it makes the selling more possible. ## Jason You're taking the things that are required regulatory-wise and instead of making a paper that someone has to read through, you're breaking it down into smaller steps. So okay, you got the name, you got the picture, we know it's moose meat. What is the fat content or something? I don't know, there could be any kind of regulation around it. But that's the mandatory stuff. So you take them one step at a time through those mandatory fields and make that process as smooth as possible. That's really cool. ## Risto The next step is using as much AI-generated content as we can. For example, just take a good picture and it generates the other things for you. It has to be. We have a lot of producers who have packages, and we cannot see what kind of content is inside. Especially for them. But these people know how to drive it down and make it good. We're testing different things that hopefully can speed things up. ## Jason In terms of your product and where it stands, it's still quite young: October last year, though you've been thinking about it for some time before. What does your future look like? Where do you see things going. You mentioned AI and identifying the product differently. What's next for you? ## Risto The next thing is, we're still looking at different ways to support these small producers in various ways. One is connecting them with businesses: restaurants, hotels, cafeterias, all over Finland and internationally. We try to make that possible with different features, testing if it grows. But also we have a speciality for individual consumers. We want to make pickup stations happen. We have this plan for shipping containers. We have already one shipping container, 10 feet, that has a glass front. ## Jason The whole side of it is glass. ## Risto Yes. Then we can have it as a station for pickup, that doesn't include any persons. Totally automated. ## Jason So as a consumer, I'd be like, okay, I've got a party coming up, I want to buy a whole bunch of berries to go with my pancakes. And I can order. Do I order them first, or can I just go to the thing at the glass wall and pick from it? ## Risto Both. You can self-service yourself in the pickup stations, but you can also order them in the future. We want to do it that way: one portion of the container is where these producers can hold their stock. Because I noticed when talking with producers, especially these small produce (foragers, butchery), they have difficulties with the stock. ## Jason Warehousing themselves. ## Risto Yes. We hope to make them in places that are near the buyers. Nowadays, there are two ways buyers can get it: someone picks up from the farm, or they go to the farm. When we have various shipping containers as pickup stations where this produce can be available, it makes it more accessible for the buyers. The idea is that we have to make it very cost-effective for us on the business side, but also for small producers who are heavily dependent on getting a fair price. ## Jason I'm very curious, how do you plan on funding this shipping container? Who pays for it? ## Risto The European Union is one. We have project funding. It's not official yet, but we have various ways to do it. I was surprised that it wasn't that costly to rent the shipping container. ## Jason You've got to put it somewhere. ## Risto The rent for placing it in the centre of cities, I guess, is going to be expensive. But hopefully we can do it step-by-step, test it out, see how many are profitable, how much it's going to cost us long-term. And is it profitable for the producers? ## Jason I can imagine you have a QR code, put somewhere on your webpage, that you can scan the QR code from the shipping container itself. And then later just refresh the page and get a live update of what's inside. So you'd be like, I'm looking to make hamburgers, I want to make it out of moose meat this time, so you could look it up and go find it. I see a lot of potential in that. That's a cool direction to go. ## Risto I can see what's possible now, how to make it feasible. What can the user do with their mobile phone? Having a native app that connects to the shipping container. ## Jason It's nearby. ## Risto We want it to be user-friendly on the consumer side, but also for visitors from other countries who can see "what is this kind of forestly-looking container here? There's a producer. I want to try this blueberry." ## Jason You have to think about the consumer in a much broader way when you get a public venue like a shipping container. That's really interesting. So as we start to wrap up, tell me a little bit about your team. Who's involved with your company at this point, and what kind of roles are you looking for? ## Risto I'm the only founder, but I've been working with various people. We've been running mainly in Northern Finland, near Oulu, also Kainuu, and Lapland. I met a woman who handles mainly the communication side and sparring on the operations level. So she's not talking to the customers directly, no. We don't have full-time people. She's been doing some work in Kainuu, she lives in Kemijärvi. Geographically we have Lapland, Kainuu, and the Oulu level covered. We spar ideas and make sure the marketing and communication side is clear and focused. From the start, I really wanted the branding done right, right away. I used money for the logos, the branding side. It's still going today. I have meetings with UI/UX designers and graphical people. So various people in board with Willit doing specific things. ## Jason You've got your team members. Just with one person, you're already very spread out in terms of kilometres between you. And they cover that area because the industry you're working with is very hands-on. Is that right? ## Risto We have a need to talk directly to the producers. Luckily, here in Oulu and the Northern parts of Finland, we have projects going on that focus on solving this kind of problem: supporting small producers and making buying possible in another way. We've included these projects, gotten some traction from them. For other team members, I have people in Vaasa doing the shipping container work, because they have experience with similar things for almost two years. ## Jason They've made other kinds of projects with shipping containers? ## Risto They have been doing the same kind of marketplace for local produce. They contacted us to get this collaboration going with Willit. They want to maybe leave their own product and go support Willit, because they knew we can do something more. ## Jason So your advantage, from what I'm hearing, is having this interconnected team, being able to work so closely with the customer up here in the North. That was your key playing card when dealing with them. They had a technical solution but didn't have the customers to bring them in. ## Risto In local things in Vaasa region, but we have, in a sense, you've spread out. That's where your advantage is. We're testing things here in Oulu, but we have producers around Northern Finland and Lapland, because they're known for this speciality, for natural produce. ## Jason The further North you go, the better.