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market-farming - Re: Farmers Market Display ideas/sampling/signs

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Subject: Market Farming

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  • From: Alex McGregor <waldenfarm AT sprintmail.com>
  • To: market farming <market-farming AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: Farmers Market Display ideas/sampling/signs
  • Date: Fri, 04 Feb 2000 17:37:30 -0500


Wilderness Flowers wrote:

> >Nothing slows sales down then a partially filled container. If I sold out,
> I didn't bring enough.

Something I learned from the produce manager of a food co-op, where I was the
store
manager, is to keep produce bins full. He said that if he let the broccoli
(for example)
get down to only a few heads in the display cooler, no more would sell that
day. If he
kept it full, we sold 10-12 cases a day. He called this the "cornucopia
effect."

I adapted this to selling at a market by carrying extra baskets of various
sizes. When
there were lulls in the action, I put vegies in smaller baskets. The half
bushel of
whatever is more appealing to customers spilling out of a half bushel basket
than in a
half full bushel basket.

The main thing is to keep working your produce. Cull the wilted or mangled
and keep the
containers and display shelves full. I decrease display size as the day wears
on. You can
also give away the less than perfect and mangled as freebies- buys more good
will and
repeat sales than cash does.

And the gallon jugs of water rotated through our chest freezer work great! We
fill them
with our filtered drinking water for cold drinks during the market, and they
keep the
greens cool. I made boxes out of scrap plywood and lined them with 1/2"
styrene
insulation board on the inside. The insulation is a friction fit so I can
take it out for
cleaning the boxes.

Happy Marketing!

Alex McGregor
Walden Farm
Walden Ridge, TN





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