Farewell to the farmer’s market, hello to the food club
This is the first time in a few years that I haven’t been a vendor or a regular customer at a farmer’s market. I don’t regret this fact. It has meant a lot less work for a comparable number of sales, more than four hours of sleep Friday nights, and the ability to spend my time farming, writing, reading, and living my life rather than spending a full day standing at a booth. What’s more, my relationship with my key customers has been strengthened. They get more of the products they want, and we get more time to chat when I see them. So how am I selling my products without a farmer’s market? I sell my meat and eggs through the Arkansas Sustainability Network’s (ASN) food club.
The way it works is fairly simple: Customers sign up to be members for a low fee of $5 a month that helps to cover overhead. Each week, a group of organic and sustainable farmers provide a list of their available products to an order coordinator. All of the products are listed in an e-mail that goes out to members. Members respond with what they want to order for the week and buy from the farmers they choose. Farmers drop their goods off and pick up a check from the ASN. Then, the customers simply come pick up their orders during a two hour window on Saturday morning and pay the Sustainability Network for the food. ASN doesn’t profit from the transaction, but simply facilitates the interaction between farmers and customers, though most farmers donate five percent of their sales to keep the program going. If farmers want to help up with the pickup and interact with customers they can. If they just want to get back to the farm they can take their checks and leave.
The ASN food club is much like several programs around the country, notably the Oklahoma Food Cooperative. It is the most farmer- friendly system I am aware of because it allows farmers to sell their goods directly to consumers without having to mark down their prices for wholesale, and gives farmers the freedom to spend more of their time farming rather than being peddlers at a farmer’s market.
The food club is also good from a customer perspective because unlike most community-supported agriculture (CSA) memberships, customers have a choice of products from more than one farmer. At the ASN, food club customers can buy everything from buffalo meat to zucchini, a variety that is not available from most CSAs. The order is also not preset. Customers don’t simply get a box of the pick of the week—they get exactly what they choose.
The food club system is also a better business model than farmers markets because it concentrates the most important kind of buyers. Farmer’s markets require farmers to spend a lot of time with people who are just browsers, not buyers. That is all well and good, but the browsers can often inhibit the ability to get to the buyers. The food club attracts only serious buyers, and because most of the business is coming from them and not the browsers, sales increase per customer.
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