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market-farming - Re: [Market-farming] Restaurant update

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  • From: Road's End Farm <organic87 AT frontiernet.net>
  • To: Market Farming <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [Market-farming] Restaurant update
  • Date: Wed, 23 May 2012 08:56:07 -0400


On May 23, 2012, at 8:40 AM, Richard Stewart wrote:

They have been used to working with a short list of vendors for their produce and meats.

They're also most likely used to those vendors almost always having everything available, in whatever quantity is wanted, and on only a couple of days' notice.

Working with individual small growers and seasonal availability is quite a jump from that. They often also know next to nothing about farming and don't understand that different crops need different amounts of time to grow, let alone that growers often need to order seed, work out field plans, and sometimes start transplants well ahead of time for planting out in the field. I have had buyers say to me in late May "It's planting season now, we thought we'd better get back to you" when I had been trying my best to have a discussion with them in January when I was working out seed orders, and when some of what they wanted needed to be started as transplants in March and other items needed to be planted in the field in April.

An additional difficulty is, as someone else mentioned, that some restaurants change chefs frequently. The person with whom you actually did succeed in having a discussion in January may have been replaced by July by someone with an entirely different idea of what to put on the menu, and/or an entirely different degree of desire to buy local produce.

None of that makes it impossible to sell to chefs -- many growers do quite nicely at it. But there are significant challenges on both sides of the deal.


-- Rivka; Finger Lakes NY, Zone 6A now I think
Fresh-market organic produce, small scale




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