Our farms continuing evolution in sales

[Chris Smith]

Coastview Aquaponics began selling produce to friends and neighbores over a year and a half ago. At that time our first system was small but rapidly expanding. We had such great responce to our produce we decided to build another system so we could grow more and sell more. Once our commercial system was up and running we had a problem of having more produce than we could sell out of our home at the time. We joined a local farmers market, started haveng 3 farm sale days, and  we got an account at a local health food store.

The farmers market was a new one and did not have very good attendance.  Getting ready for the market took a lot of time to prep, load up, sell, and break down. In the end it took ALL day for a 4 hour market which we didn't sell out regularly, so we were not sad when the market ended for good.

Our farm sale/tour days worked well for us. We send out weekly emails informing our customers what we have for sale. We were open Tue and Thur afternoons 4:00-6:00 And Sat 9:00-12:00. The week day afternoon sales were great and our customers very appreciative that they could come and get the freshest produce from just around the corner. We preform tours and sales Saturdays as well and it can get quite busy on this day. Lots of times families come and their kids play with our daughter while their parents spend time touring and talking story. After a while the Tue and Thur sales became a little bit of a burden as we had to make it home by 4:00 on those days.

The health food store was able to sell a fair amount of living lettuce for us at times. We would prepare it and deliver to them on their demand. They usually wanted to stock up before the weekend. The produce manager did not work the weekend and others were in charge of the section.  There was little attention payed to the produce and they had a hard time keeping a living plant alive in their display through the weekend.  By Monday lots of the lettuce looked so poor that it would not sell. They would then want a credit! We could keep living lettuce in our refrigerator for more than 3 weeks with little loss of quality. We also had a hard time getting payed from them. We could typically grow the lettuce in less time than it took to get payed.

After trying all these different approaches we decided that it was far easier for us to let customers come to us to buy produce. We are able to sell direct to them for less than the stores charge and we get a better price than stores pay. A win-win situation for all by cutting out the middle man. Some of our regular customers complained of having a hard time getting here during our farm sale times so we began looking for another way to serve them and make life easier for us. What we come up with is our honor farm refrigerator.

We now sell produce every day of the week out of an honor farm refrigerator located at the top corner of our garage. We stock it daily with the best of what we have on that day. This allows customers to come at their convenience instead of ours. We can make up special orders for customers and leave them marked with their name. We have now eliminated our Tue-Thur farm sales/tours but still do a Saturday sale/tour day. This method has turned out to be the easiest and most profitable way for us to sell and we are now selling 100% of our produce to the neighborhood. The fridge has been so popular that we will soon upgrade to a larger one to have the ability to stock more variety inside.

This has proved to be a great way to sell produce and has potential for farms of all sizes. We let customers come to us and they give us cash without having to be here to deal with them. I would like to see more farms out there providing this kind of service to their immediate community and help keep the food miles as low as possible.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[TCLynx]

Cool, Fish Taco's

[Tom McLemore]

What a great way to sell fillets. I can picture a trailer with a glass front tank and customers could pick out the fish they want. You fillet it for them and away they go with the freshest fish in town.

[David Rosenstein]

Farm fridge is brilliant!

Thanks.