Webinar: Maximizing Meat Sales at Farmers Markets

Farmers markets are invaluable platforms for local meat vendors to connect with customers, showcase their products, and boost sales.

In a recent webinar featuring Matt LeRoux from Cornell Extension and Anna Pesek, a local vendor at a farmers market, key strategies and insights were shared to enhance performance at farmers markets.

Let's delve into the discussion and explore ways to optimize sales at these bustling marketplaces.

Watch the webinar below or scroll down for a summary and full transcript:

Utilizing Point of Sale (PoS) Systems for Enhanced Farmers Market Data Collection:

One of the crucial tools highlighted in the webinar was the use of Point of Sale (PoS) systems for passive data collection. Matt LeRoux emphasized the importance of utilizing PoS data to analyze performance metrics such as price, quantity, transactions total, and payment methods. This detailed data collection allows vendors to gain valuable insights into customer behavior and market trends, enabling them to make informed decisions to drive sales.

Understanding Farmers Market Customer Behavior and Spending Patterns:

By analyzing the data collected through PoS systems, vendors can gain a deeper understanding of customer behavior and spending patterns. The statistical model discussed in the webinar helps isolate individual variables that influence customer spending, such as transaction size and timing.

For instance, it was noted that customer transaction size tends to decrease as the market hours progress, highlighting the importance of capturing peak spending during early market hours. Understanding these patterns allows vendors to strategically plan their sales approach to maximize revenue.

Enhancing Customer Engagement and Efficiency at Farmers Market Stalls:

Efficient market stall setup and customer engagement play a significant role in driving sales at farmers markets. It was observed that busyness at the stall can negatively impact customer spending, with a higher customer influx leading to smaller transactions. To counter this, vendors can consider sprucing up their stalls early to attract customers during peak spending hours and implementing strategies to engage with customers during slower periods.

Having additional staff during peak hours, a clear checkout station, and optimizing the stall layout can contribute to a more efficient and engaging customer experience.

Strategies for Increasing Customer Spending at Farmers Markets:

An effective strategy discussed in the webinar was the manipulation of item values and presentation to encourage higher customer spending. By bundling items together, selling by weight, or altering pricing structures, vendors can influence customers to purchase multiple items, thereby increasing their overall spending.

Additionally, suggesting complementary items to customers can lead to upsells and larger transactions, as reported anecdotally by farms. Understanding the concept of price elasticity and its impact on customer spending allows vendors to adjust their offerings strategically to drive sales.

Measuring and Improving Farmers Market Performance:

To maintain a strong presence at farmers markets and continuously improve performance, it is essential for vendors to track key metrics such as customer counts, transaction sizes, daily gross sales, and item popularity.

By comparing data from different market days and years, vendors can identify trends, evaluate the effectiveness of their strategies, and make data-driven decisions to enhance sales performance. Keeping track of these metrics enables vendors to adapt to market dynamics, optimize their offerings, and create a more successful market experience for both vendors and customers.

Conclusion:

Farmers markets offer a vibrant and dynamic environment for local vendors to showcase their products and engage with customers.

By leveraging insights shared in the webinar, vendors can enhance their sales strategies, understand customer behavior, and optimize their market performance. Incorporating data-driven approaches, enhancing customer engagement, and strategically influencing customer spending can lead to increased sales and a more successful presence at farmers markets.

Adopting these strategies can empower vendors to thrive in the competitive market landscape and build lasting relationships with customers through unique and memorable market experiences.

Full Farmers Market Webinar Transcript:

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:00:00]:
Thank you guys for joining us tonight. We are really excited to have two awesome guests with us, Matt LeRoux of Cornell Extension. We'll be kind of doing the first part of our presentation tonight. And then we are also joined by one of our top local vendors, Anna Pesek. I hope I'm saying your last name right. And she will kind of be talking about their farms experience at the farmers market and kind of what they do to get ready for farmers market season. So if you haven't joined us before, we always like to talk a little bit about chop local and what we do. So we are an online farmers market specifically for meat.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:00:41]:
We have vendors all across the country, and we help them set up online stores and provide technical support for them to sell their meat online. In addition to helping our vendors, we also do lots of webinars like this and other educational trainings that you can find on chop local university.com. So with that, I will go ahead and pass things over to Matt. Feel free to put your questions in the q and a throughout the evening, and we will get to those at the end. Okay, I am going to stop sharing, Matt. So there you go.

Matt LeRoux [00:01:19]:
All right, thanks. Good evening, everyone. Thanks for coming. Let me share my screen, make sure that's all. And Sydney, you guys are, you're just seeing this slide, right? Not the presenter view? All right, thanks. Yeah. So I'm going to talk about research that we've been doing at farmers markets here in New York using point of sale systems. So we use the square system for our research, but I think some other point of sale systems could possibly produce the same kind of data.

Matt LeRoux [00:01:58]:
I'm just going to talk about how we were using it, why we were using it, and then some of the, I'm going to call them still early results. We piloted this in 2018 with veggie growers, and then something happened in 2020, but in 2021, we piloted it with meat vendors. I'm going to talk about both results from 2018 and 2021, and it's also ongoing research. So I have, but I'm not presenting yet results from 22 and 23. And yeah, I'm an extension associate at Cornell in the applied economics department of the ag school. So just to get everyone familiar, if you're not already familiar with PoS, it means point of sale. I don't know what you were thinking, but it means point of sale. And back in 2018, I really didn't see much usage at farmers markets, particularly among the veggie growers that I was working with that year.

Matt LeRoux [00:03:03]:
And at that time, it's when I had to say it's not just a credit card machine, because a lot of farms had square or another POS system, and they just used it to process a credit card. And they didn't really set it up or record all their sales in it. But that can be done. That's what we recommend. So it's an app that you can load on tablets and smartphones. And the most common one, or probably the one that people are familiar with, is square. So in the case of square, you've got the screen with little squares that are programmed with all your products. You can see in the screenshot there, the person, this vendor, they've got meat cuts, they have sausages, they have kale potato bags.

Matt LeRoux [00:03:46]:
You know, you can use pictures or write the name of the product or use colored boxes, but when a customer comes along, you just touch the squares to add those items into their order, and it totals up their order. It can be used offline, so you don't have to have a data plan or a Wi Fi connection. And what I saw, the value that I saw with point of sale system is that it, it's really a passive data collection system. So collecting highly detailed data at a farmer's market would be very difficult if all you had was, you know, pad and a pen, which is the old fashioned way. It's hard to get a lot of detail using that system. But just by checking out a customer with a POS system, you're automatically creating a data set. And once you have that set, you can export it into something like Microsoft Excel, and then you can start working with your own numbers. And that's, that's what we did.

Matt LeRoux [00:04:43]:
And I see that my camera keeps like staggering and stuff. Is the audio coming okay?

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:04:49]:
Yeah, it sounds good to me.

Matt LeRoux [00:04:50]:
Okay, good. Just wanted to make sure it wasn't cutting out. So more about pos, you get this data, you can, you know, like I said, you can export it into Excel, and then you can begin to work with it. When you record a transaction, what you're getting is the price and quantity and the unit of each item. So items that are sold by weight or by the each, you get the customer's transaction total, and then there's a timestamp and a location stamp. If you set up locations in your POS system, you'll have all the locations. You can also add the name of the staff person that's working and then how the customer paid, whether they used cash, credit card, or other forms of payment. Then you export that and you can look across all transactions.

Matt LeRoux [00:05:39]:
So in the case of square, that's the system I'm familiar with. So I talk mostly about square. You can get a transactions report into Excel, and then you can also get an items report. And the items report shows you each unique item that was sold, regardless of what else that customer bought, whereas the transaction report gives you a summary of all the transactions. And you can use this data. I think it's a great tool. Like I said, it's a passive data collection tool because you're really doing something else, checking out customers. But if you can hack the system to get what you want out of it.

Matt LeRoux [00:06:16]:
So I think you could use it as a proxy for harvest records in the case of being a vegetable grower, where you look at all the units or the pounds sold, and you can make some assumptions about how much you would have harvested based on sales. You can compare staff and location performances. So comparing markets against each other or different staff that are selling at markets. We have one farm that we thought it would be fun. We compared the husband and wife against each other, which sales each one made, and got some insights about each of their sales abilities at market. Kind of a fun, fun way to use the data. And then, yeah, if you're going to use a system like this, and if you have an inclination to look at numbers, you should learn how to use excel. Pivot tables.

Matt LeRoux [00:07:07]:
They're actually really easy. It's a quick way to summarize huge amounts of data, and then you could sort of sort and summarize that data in different ways to learn from it. So I definitely recommend pivot tables. They're easy. There's YouTube videos on them. But yeah, if you're a number cruncher, you create your data set and then you start looking through it with these. So we had some research questions in working with POS data, and I had done some research over ten years ago now that was comparing the different market channels that farms can sell through. So I was looking at farmers market and roadside farmstand and CSA and wholesale to restaurants, all these different channels.

Matt LeRoux [00:07:52]:
And what we concluded at that time was that actually farmers markets, on average, for various farms that participated in the research, were usually their poorest performing market channel. That was in the sense of the number of dollars in sales that they could create compared to the amount of labor that they had to invest in the channel. So you can imagine how a wholesale channel would be more efficient because fewer hours and larger sales. But, you know, recognizing that farmers markets were weak in this sort of dollars per hour, we also saw that farmers markets have a lot of value that we weren't measuring. So for beginning farmers or farmers with new products, you know, you get rapid customer feedback on your product. You really learn how to improve your product. Farmers markets are a way, are sort of like a form of, you know, advertising. You're just getting your name out there, building customer familiarity.

Matt LeRoux [00:08:50]:
And they're also a great way to recruit customers to use and shop with your other market channels. So, you know, for example, for the CSA, Veggie farms, where do you meet your members? Well, they first meet you at the farmers market and try your product out and then they might become a CSA member. So we saw a lot of value in farmers markets. And so our research question became, how can we improve them? What are the measurable factors that a farm could measure that could then influence customer spending at farmers markets in order to maintain a presence at farmers markets and improve their performance? If we're already going to put this number of hours in, let's say it's an eight hour commitment to participate in a farmers market. We're still going to be there for 8 hours. But now how can we get more dollars out of those hours? Can we increase sales at a farmers market using factors within the farm's control? And that's why we wanted to look at the data that was available to us. An individual farm probably can't change the hours or the day of the week that a market operates, probably can't change the number of vendors that are there, and certainly can't change the weather. But what are the factors that a farm can influence to improve market channel performance for farmers markets? And to put that in very simple terms, is it possible for you to get more money out of a market that you're already attending? So that was, that was our research question.

Matt LeRoux [00:10:15]:
And I'm going to think about this old adage that I was taught when I was in grad school and ag econ, you know, all the old agricultural economists, I guess they're all negative because they all want to say you can't improve what you don't measure. And it was a valuable lesson, but I wanted to flip that on its head and say, well, that means you can improve, of course, what you do measure. So you get metrics out of data. And what we're going to look at is customer counts at a market both per hour and per day per market. We're going to look at customer transaction size, both in terms of how much consumers are spending with us at the farmers market and also how many items they're buying. Both are useful measures of transaction size. We'll obviously look at daily gross sales. That's something that probably everybody was recording anyway.

Matt LeRoux [00:11:05]:
But now we'll have it in our data set. Look at the average item value for the items that the farm is selling, and then finally we can look at item popularity. So the sale in dollars and in units of various items. Excuse me. These are some of the metrics that we can create once we have a data set based on customer transactions. And when we have that, we'll think about where are the opportunities to grow daily sales. So if average daily gross sales is really just comprised of the average number of customers that shop with a farm at the farmers market, multiplied by the average that those customers spend, and so if we can increase influence and increase either side of this equation, the number of customers or the spend, we'll have a better average daily gross sales. Right? Say it another way.

Matt LeRoux [00:11:59]:
If we keep getting the same number of customers on average at our markets, but we're finding ways to get those customers to spend more money, we'll have a better day. Or if we find a way to lure in more customers, but our average customer spend remains flat, we're still going to have a better day. And ideally, we'll work on both sides of the multiplication sign here. Try to get more customers and get those people to spend more money. And I'll give you an example of a success story from our project. So we're really looking at customer counts and the different aspects of customer spending. And I've kind of broken that out here and I'll break it out on the slides that are to follow. We'll look at item values, which are also part of how big we're packaging our items.

Matt LeRoux [00:12:43]:
We'll look at how many items our customers are buying, and then finally, we'll visit pricing as an opportunity to increase customer spending. I'm going to share with you some of the summary statistics from the two. The two first runs that we've done. So first in 2018 is the first time we ever did this kind of research. We got eight farms to participate, and what participation meant was that they recorded all of their customer transactions at all of their farmers markets. So when a customer paid with cash, they still recorded that transaction. They had all of their items and their prices programmed into the square pos in advance so that they could record everything. There's no fee when you do a cash transaction, so it didn't hurt them.

Matt LeRoux [00:13:33]:
Among those eight farms, they were participating in 16 market days per week. So on average, each farm was doing about two markets a week. I just want to say we called it market days because some of them were at the same markets. So in some cases, we had three farms at the same farmers market collecting data. So each time a farm goes to a farmers market and records a day of sales, that creates a market day. So we were getting the data from 16 market days every week. So a total for the season, which for us, we started recording in about June, and we ended in early October. We've managed to record 205 market days in those markets.

Matt LeRoux [00:14:15]:
That totaled up, among all the farms, to almost 20,000 customer transactions and a total of about $128,000 in sales. And then collectively, those farms sold about 38,000 vegetable items. There were a few other items in there, like honey and maple, which are a little bit more high value items. There were some potted flowers, maybe some cut flowers, but by and large, it was mostly vegetable items. So when you look at that summary of those transactions that were recorded, you can see that those farms were experiencing about 97 customers per market, on average. Across all 16 different market days that we were observing, their average sales per market, this is for vegetables, was $631. Now, 2018 is already ancient history, but ill just tell you back then, I remember that was a grim number, 631. I had done research in zero, nine and 2010, where the average daily sales for vegetable growers was higher.

Matt LeRoux [00:15:18]:
Some of those were the same farmers markets and the same farms. So what we were seeing in 2018 is that farmers market sales were really in a decline. So it was timely to be taking a look at transactions and looking for opportunities. The average customer was spending about $6.50 and basically buying two items. And that made sense because the rule of thumb, the sort of expectation for veggie sales back then, was that each item would cost about $3. And that's what we're seeing, is basically customers are buying two three dollar items when they shop with a veggie vendor. For the meat project, we did this in 2021. So a lot had, a lot had changed in those few years, and local food was really kind of filling a boom, and I'd say some of that's still carrying over.

Matt LeRoux [00:16:09]:
So for our pilot study with meat vendors, we had ten farms participating, and among them, they were doing 27 market days each week. So these farms were doing more than the average of just two markets a week. We did it for nearly the entire year. So because of the popularity of winter markets and because meat vendors have product year round, we managed to record 644 market days. That year with 26,000 customer transactions, about $670,000 in sales, and a total of 27,000 items. None of these numbers are really going to benefit you. It's just to give you an idea of the size of our data set and the scope of our project when I get into some of the later slides. So, just to quickly run down these summary stats, that means they were seeing about 41 customers in a market.

Matt LeRoux [00:17:00]:
And, you know, the veggie growers were seeing about 97. But that that's within expectations. We'd expect meat vendors to see fewer customers than veggie customers, but that they'd have customers who spend more money. So, yeah, their average daily sales were over $1,000, and most customers were spending about 25, 50 when they bought one meat item. And again, that, that makes sense, with the average meat item value being about $24 back in 2021. So all within expectations and looking good, just to give you a scope of what was going on. All right, so now I'm going to tell you some of what we learned. We do these summaries like we just showed you, but we also run all the transactions through what's called a regression model.

Matt LeRoux [00:17:48]:
That's a statistical model that allows you to isolate individual variables to see their influence on customer spending, and that reveals some statistically significant and interesting outcomes, again, isolated. So, controlling for all other factors, one thing that we found that we thought was really interesting was that customer transaction size, or cts, drops with each hour. And of course, you know this instinctively if you've sold at farmers markets. But now we were able to quantify it. So in both the meat and veg cohort, what we found is that customer spending got smaller. Customer transactions shrink on average, with each passing hour of a farmers market. So the top spending is in the first hour, and then it steadily falls. When you learn this, when you learn that this is what's happening, you look for your opportunities to increase customer spending to influence your average daily sales.

Matt LeRoux [00:18:46]:
What you really want to do is perhaps increase customer counts during those later hours. It's probably easiest to catch or to add more customers during slowest hours, as opposed to trying to get more customers during a peak time, which may not work out well. So the objective would be to find ways to draw customers into your booth, arrive early, and be ready to sell on time. And I'm going to chuckle a little bit. A lot of these local farms that participate in this research are also, have also become friends through the years, and some of them roll in pretty late. So, you know, if you know that customers are going to spend the most in the first hour. You want to be, you want to be all ready to sell when the market begins. And since there's no rule against it here, we actually recommend that you get, you get to the market early and be ready to sell about a half an hour before official start time.

Matt LeRoux [00:19:42]:
After the peak rush, take time to spruce up the stall to restock. If you're a vegetable producer, maybe missed the vegetables so everything looks fresh and bountiful, pile it up. Check your signage. If it's later on in the market. And we know customer numbers are dwindling, you want to try to engage people by making eye contact when they're still walking around the market. And we see, I think I have it on a Starburst here. Yeah. Set up earlier to capture more of those early market, early sales.

Matt LeRoux [00:20:14]:
And then later on in the market, it might be very tempting to go barter or to go chat, but this is an opportunity to improve your day. So stay in the booth to capture late market sales. And one of our participating farms, we dropped in on announce to see them at the market and their market stall was empty because they were off socializing, which I understand. But certainly you can't make any sales if your booth is totally empty. So we also found a factor that we call busyness, and it has to do with the customer experience. So we found in the meat study particularly, that for each additional customer in a five minute period, customer transaction size would drop by about $0.42. Again, this is over 26,000 transactions. So, you know, it's from a big data set, carefully analyzed using a statistical model.

Matt LeRoux [00:21:11]:
And so we feel very confident about this 42 cent drop. So as a, as a farmers market stall begins to get busier with more customers, the tendency would be for those customers to begin to spend less. And that's what we were seeing for each additional customer. In a five minute period, the CTs, customer transaction size drops. And then when market stall gets really busy, so we drew a line at, well, it's called one standard deviation above the average, but it's the 3.58 customers. When you're busy above that level in a five minute period, then the impact is even bigger on customer spending. So $0.81 smaller per additional customer. And again, that's compounding.

Matt LeRoux [00:22:00]:
So the more customers, the lower the spending would get. So what do you do when you learn something like this? The implications are that people shop at farmers markets because they want to talk to you. We think customer interaction is a really important part of farmers market. So obviously, during busy, busy times, they're getting less interaction. So they can't ask a question about how do I cook that cut of meat or that vegetable? Um, there's less time for you to recommend second items. Right. So customer spending might fall down. Uh, we've heard, you know, anecdotally from some customers that say when they, they see the farm, uh, stall is really busy, they feel bad about taking time from the farm.

Matt LeRoux [00:22:42]:
And so they just, you know, they're just going to grab one thing and get out of your hair. And that's probably some of what explains why customer transaction size gets smaller. So, uh, our suggestions are to have additional staff during your peak hours. If you know that you're going to get really, really busy, bring in a second or third person, so that that's cutting busy. You know, if you're normally a one person market stall and you bring in a second person, you've cut busyness in half because now there's two of you to take care of customers. Also, look at your market stall design. There are designs that are more efficient for checking out customers. So reducing busyness than other designs.

Matt LeRoux [00:23:21]:
And I'll have a picture of that in a moment. I wrote an article about this after the 2021 study because I really saw effective stall designs out there and I saw really ineffective stall designs. And I heard from the farms that had these, you know, these ineffective market stalls that they felt totally busy, like they were dealing with five to seven customers all at once. And that's, you know, that was definitely going to be hurting their customer transaction size. So this is an example of a good layout. And I wrote an article that's in a publication called growing for market. Excuse me. It was back in the November and December 2022 issue.

Matt LeRoux [00:24:10]:
But it just shows really, I think what's key is to have the point of sale checkout station at the end, whether you have just an l or just a single line, straight line table, putting it at that one end instead of in the middle so that customers know it's clear where to go to get checked out. And this is just a drawing of a farm's design that they're using. This farm is down close New York City. It's a very busy market. This vendor obviously has a lot of product and during peak sales gets really, really busy and is able to handle everyone alone because of this efficient design. So he's got, he's got, clearly got a checkout station there. You can see the scale. The tablet is on a little stand.

Matt LeRoux [00:25:00]:
There's a cash box. And I think it's a nice touch that there's a spot for customers to put their stuff down. I stood there and watched a little while. Everybody would put a shopping bag or a purse or a cup of coffee down when they had the chance. So that's a really good stall design right there. All right, so when it comes to busyness, I have a success story. A farm that participated in our 2021 research. We noticed that the busyness really hurt their customer spending much, much more dramatically than the group average.

Matt LeRoux [00:25:34]:
So their 2021 average customer transaction size dropped by $2.19 for each additional customer in five minutes. This is a lot worse than the project average of just $0.42. So both are a loss, but 219 is a lot more to lose on transaction size. So we met with them and suggested, we asked what was going on to try to ascertain why they were taking such a big hit when they got busy. And we suggested that they add a second person to their one farmers market, where they really experienced a high level of busyness. So they started adding a second person on July 15 of 2023. And then we just watched their sales data afterwards to see the impact. So we have a baseline here.

Matt LeRoux [00:26:25]:
I was showing you that they lost $2.19 on average when they got busy in 2021. But then we wanted to compare 2022 and 2023. So what I want to draw your attention to is that when they added the second person in 23, we just looked at that sales data from July to October, and we looked at the same period in 2022 and compared. What we found is that by having the second person there, they're actually able to take on more customers. So their average customer count in a five minute period went from two customers to 2.6. So it went up by about half a customer. Interestingly, average customer transaction size increased by almost $2. And we assume that's because they were getting more customer interaction.

Matt LeRoux [00:27:16]:
When there were two people working, their average daily customer count at this market increased by almost 26 customers. So this is average daily customer count. They went from having, on average, 78, 79 customers to about 104. So that's 25 more customers per market. And their average daily sales also increased by $760, which has a really significant increase in sales. So that's partially explained by higher customer spending and partially explained by the higher customer counts. Those two things, the customers they were already getting began spending more because they weren't so busy now and then they also gained new customers who were spending that new average. So all that together meant that they were getting about $760 more in sales, 2023.

Matt LeRoux [00:28:10]:
So it seemed like a really great outcome. We also studied the way that customers pay and, you know, in both cases, both veg and meat, when customers paid with a credit card, they spent more money on average. And yeah, especially in 2018, fewer customers were paying for vegetables with credit cards. But by 2021, you know, 57% of meat purchases at farmers markets were being paid for by a credit card. That 57% is across all of our participating farms. And then I showed you the range. So some farms had as high as 92%. Basically, all their customers paid with credit card and makes a lot of sense for meat purchases because they are more expensive that people would pay with credit card.

Matt LeRoux [00:28:57]:
The implication, when you know that customers will spend more by paying with a credit card, then you should accept credit cards. And some farms are reluctant to accept credit cards because the fee structure. But I just did the math. I'm not going to explain it all, but I did the math at the bottom of the slide there. Just showing you what it would cost on the average transaction size, based on our research. And the conclusion is for a meat transaction, you're going to pay on average, $0.73 in fees, but you're going to gain $2.28 in customer spending. So it makes sense to go through with the fees and still gain on the customer spending. We also suggest that you make sure your customers know that you accept credit card.

Matt LeRoux [00:29:40]:
And that takes us to another success story that's sort of funny. Here we're doing all this research and all of this analysis, and our conclusion is you should stick up a paper sign that says you accept credit cards. But we were working with this farm and we said we noticed low credit card usage for their sales compared to the other farms in the project, so that 32% of their customers were using credit cards compared to the group average of 57%. In talking with the farm, we asked, do you have a sign that says you accept credit cards? And they said, no, we don't. All right, well, how about you put up a sign? And that's the literal sign. So it's, it's a sheet of paper printed on home printer, and it says, we accept credit cards, cash and checks. They put the sign up on July 8 in 2023. So once again, we compared the 2022 data from that period of July through October with 2023.

Matt LeRoux [00:30:36]:
And here's what we found. The coefficient for paying with a card, meaning the difference for a customer paying with credit card compared to a customer paying with cash, increased by $0.21. So it was already positive. At 253, credit card customers were spending $2.53 more than cash customers. But that number actually climbed a little bit to 274. That percent of their customers that were using credit cards increased from 36% of the customers up to 39% of the customers. The average customer transaction size increased from $20.50 up to $22. Oh, that's a.

Matt LeRoux [00:31:21]:
Don't, don't look at that. 760. This carried over from the old slide. And then on average, their daily customer account increased from 67 customers a day up to 90. So the credit card sign essentially increased customer spending, increased average customer transaction size, and increased the number of customers that were shopping with them. We think that, you know, before the sign, customers that were walking by that maybe wanted to shop, but knew they didn't have any cash on them, might have passed them by, but now they knew they could stop in and make a purchase. And that's why we think the daily customer counts went from 67 up to 90. All right, customer spending, that's we're focused on increasing.

Matt LeRoux [00:32:09]:
Just to remind you of the averages I showed you earlier, the average vegetable transaction size in 2018 was 647. And the average meat transaction size was $25.64. We're looking to get our customers to spend more money with us or to increase customer transaction size. There's a few ways that we can look at customer spending. One is those items values. One is the number of items per customer. And then finally, price. I'm just going to explore each of those a little bit.

Matt LeRoux [00:32:42]:
When it comes to product pack size, or you could say item value. We're going to try to increase the minimum that customers could possibly spend. So we're talking a lot about averages. And just by raising the bar or the minimum that people could spend with us, we're just going to drive the average higher. That's going to actually improve our daily sales. We want to eliminate really low priced items. In other words, we don't want customers to be able to shop with us and just spend a dollar or $2. And we can do that through our product sizes and the way that we present them.

Matt LeRoux [00:33:15]:
Package your products in units that make sense for driving up customer transactions. Give you an example that seemed really obvious in 2018, farms were selling a single head of garlic, usually for a dollar or $1.50 per individual ahead. But that meant that a customer can come and just choose one head of garlic and only spend $1 or $1.50. And that drags your average down. So without changing the price on garlic, you could just bundle them together. Garlic is a great example because it's kind of not perishable. People don't mind buying two or three heads of garlic at once. They go through it quickly.

Matt LeRoux [00:33:53]:
So you could just price it as two for three, or you could put three heads into a pint container and say that that costs 450. So you haven't changed the price of the unit price of garlic, but you are asking customers to spend more when they shop with you, because now they have to spend 450 or $3 to buy garlic. So just think about the sizes that you're offering and the way that you present your products in order to increase the minimum amount that customers can spend. And actually, in the 2018 Veg study, we found that when customer, when their shopping cart included a fruit or veg item that was sold by weight, that they spent about $1.14 more than customers whose shopping carts did not contain an item sold by weight. So to kind of unpack that, when we were starting that research in 2018, I was actually advising farms to sell everything by the each just because it would be faster. They were uncomfortable with using a POS system. It was new to them, and they were worried about having to weigh, let's say potatoes. Weigh potatoes out on a scale, then enter them into the pos.

Matt LeRoux [00:35:03]:
So I said, well, why don't you put your potatoes into quart containers right now? You can sell them by the each. It'll be faster. Well, that was bad advice. I mean, it was good advice for making fast customer transactions, but it was bad advice for increasing customer spending. Because what we really found is when customers can buy an item by weight, they'll probably choose more. They'll spend more. So if you put your potatoes in a quart container, that's all they're going to buy, right? Is that cork container. But when there's bulk potatoes and they can start filling a bag that's going to be weighed, that's when they end up spending $1.14 more.

Matt LeRoux [00:35:37]:
So I think with some relevant crops, it makes sense to sell them by weight, like potatoes. I wouldn't try selling kale by weight, but potatoes make sense. All right, items per customer. We found that the veggie customers were buying about two items and meat customers were buying one item. So if we're looking at ways to increase customer spending, the main goal would be to get single item customers to buy a second item. We've brainstormed ideas with participating farms. Make sure that the product mix includes the top selling and your most popular items, so that that increases your chances of getting people to buy a second item. Experiment with different ways to arrange the market stall.

Matt LeRoux [00:36:24]:
I don't know if you should put your most popular items up front or set them in the back. You know, the grocery store strategy is to put milk in the back corners. That way you have to walk by everything else and maybe make an impulse buy. So you could experiment at least with different arrangements. Try bundling items. Uh, we found in 2021 that, uh, most consumers, when, when they bought ground beef, they bought two pounds. So you could try presenting ground beef, not that you'd have to get it packed at your processor into two pound packs, but you could try presenting it maybe as that, like two, two for a certain price. Or try bundling items.

Matt LeRoux [00:37:03]:
And then finally, farms reported, you know, anecdotally, that when they suggested a second item to their customers, they felt like they had a lot of success with that. And that would be a good way to get one item, customers up to a second item. Just suggesting an item like, oh, hey, you're getting garlic. Do you want some onions to go with that? Right? Just suggesting. One great thing I heard a meat vendor say is they saw that their customer was buying a dinner meat item around a holiday, and they said, well, how about breakfast the next morning? Do you want to get some sausages? Just suggesting that item might lead to your one item customers buying a second item. I am watching the time, Sydney. I'm almost done. Product prices.

Matt LeRoux [00:37:51]:
Of course, increasing prices increases customer spending. Key here is that people who become customers will spend more because you have high prices. But sometimes people are worried about losing customers over price increases. You won't know what people aren't spending when they don't become a customer. But I just made this little graph with lettuce heads. You can do it with any product just to show that if a price increase does result in selling fewer units in the same amount of time, it doesn't necessarily mean the farm is going to make less in sales. So just walk through those examples. As you incrementally raise the price on lettuce heads, you can sort of forward to still lose some customers over that price change, yet gross the same amount.

Matt LeRoux [00:38:37]:
The concept of the customer's response to price increases is called price elasticity, and it's something our team is still studying, so we don't have any definitive answers. But anecdotally, farms that have gone through price increases report that most of their customers never comment on it, and they ultimately see an increase in daily sales. It's simple math, right? If you increase your prices you increase customer spending, but if in theory you lost enough customers, then you wouldn't increase your daily gross sales. I just wanted to point out that our 2018 vegetable farm that had the highest priced items also saw the highest customer spending. As we would expect, the highest item values. Once again, as we would expect, they were the top grossing farm. And it didn't seem to, those higher prices didn't seem to dissuade their customers. So they still had the same average items per customer as all the other farms with lower prices.

Matt LeRoux [00:39:41]:
So when people shopped with them, they were still buying two veg items. They weren't shying away with high prices. So I took that as sort of a pep talk. In summary, I recommend that people use a PoS system. It takes a little bit, a little experience to get up to speed. But then our most reluctant farms have contacted me to say really positive things, including that they can take care of their customers better and faster than they used to. One farm that I really had to twist their arm to participate within two weeks she said to me, how were we ever not doing this? So pos is really just little learning curve. But then it makes a lot of sense.

Matt LeRoux [00:40:25]:
Once you do that, you can establish baseline metrics that you decide on for your markets. You can download your data, take a look at it, choose something to focus on, something you want to influence with customer spending and daily sales, customer counts. Introduce changes at the market and then monitor for results. Things that you might try are raising item values. Looking at your crop selection and display engaging customers during slow times. Don't leave the stallion. Don't sit in the back of in a lawn chair looking at your phone. You know, be up there catching their eye, smiling, offering free samples.

Matt LeRoux [00:41:02]:
Arrive ready on time and be ready to sell. And, you know, maybe it's time to raise prices. We're continuing this research in New York. I'll skip my slide recruiting farms, but just to say if anyone on here is in New York and interested in participating, my email is here. And also, if anyone else has questions that occur to you later on, you'd be welcome to email me here. So that does it for me.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:41:29]:
Okay, thank you, Matt. That was awesome and really interesting data. So hopefully you all picked up a little bit from that too. And so it is about 745 or 845, depending on wherever you are. So I'm going to say, if you have questions for Matt, we will provide. If you didn't grab his email there, I will provide. Provide it in a follow up email too. But I do want us to get to talk to Anna tonight as well and kind of hear a little bit about her farmers market expertise.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:42:01]:
So we will jump into that part. So, Anna, if you want to go ahead and introduce yourself, talk a little bit about your farm and the market that you go to and how long you've been doing it, that would be awesome.

Anna Pesek [00:42:16]:
Yeah. Thanks so much, Sydney. And also, Matt, that really was a great presentation. So my name is Anna, and I co own over the Moon farm and flowers, and we're based in eastern Iowa. We've been around since the summer of 2019, so still a relatively new business. And we produce chicken, turkey, duck, pork, and some beef as well, that we sell direct to consumer, as well as some horticulture, primarily cut flowers from May through September. So we have quite a range of things. And we sell, I would say, the bulk of our products through e commerce and then also through the CSA model, both for our flowers and our meat, as well as doing some wholesale.

Anna Pesek [00:43:00]:
But we do attend one farmers market. We attend the Iowa City Farmers market, which is a fairly major farmers market in this region, but I don't think at all comparable to maybe some of the bigger ones, like on the east coast or ones that Matt might have had a picture of. So we attend the Iowa City farmers market. It runs from May until October, and we've been attending it every Saturday for the past two years. Before that, we tried out a couple other markets, some that were even a little bit closer to us. We're about a little over an hour drive away from Iowa City, but we landed on sticking with that one because it, one had the best logistics for us, it was the most convenient for pulling our vehicle in, for being able to do it as a one person team. So there's two of us. And so one of us could stay on the farm and one person could go to the market.

Anna Pesek [00:43:58]:
And it was where we had kind of the largest growing customer base. So we decided that it was worth the drive. And so, yes, that's my quick overview. Yeah.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:44:13]:
So one of the things that I liked that you talked about there at the end was kind of the reason why you picked that market and settled on that one. So are there any other tips that you have about, you know, if somebody is looking to decide on which market they want to go to, any other things that they should be thinking about?

Anna Pesek [00:44:32]:
Yeah, I mean, I think there is just some natural trial and error that has to happen to see what is going to be maybe the best fit for you. And I think it's also always a question of capacity. I think if we could cash flow more labor, we would probably choose to attend more than one market on a Saturday. But that just hasn't quite worked out for us, so. We haven't. But I think, yeah. Figuring out what is going to work best with your own personal needs around your farm and around your sales, it can take some time to figure out and take some trial and error.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:45:13]:
So my next question, you can kind of talk a little bit about what Matt talked about. But one of the questions I feel like I hear a lot when people are thinking about farmers markets for selling meat is, how do I display my product? Or, you know, how do you show it off when it needs to be frozen? So maybe talk about how you display from a product standpoint, but also how you set up your booth to kind of, like, move customers through efficiently, similar to what Matt was talking about.

Anna Pesek [00:45:43]:
Yeah, I would say this is a tough one with meat. I feel like we are still trying different things out, and sometimes I feel like there is just a reality that no matter what I do, um, I'm going to have maybe at least one person, every market, like, feel surprised that I actually have product with me, um, even if I have cooler sitting on a table, even if I have a lot of signage, um, so me, it's definitely harder to display than a vegetable. So, um, we've tried a couple different methods, and I would say the one that's worked best for us is having smaller little coolers on a table, um, with signage in front of them, like chicken or pork or, or whatever. Um, and then having, uh, I also bring, like, larger coolers with me that I leave, um, in the back of the van or, um, like, on the ground next to me that I can restock the smaller coolers with. But I have found that it's helpful to have something, like, physically on the table, um, to help people, like, to help it click that there is, in fact, product here. Um, it's not just like a pre order, or people are just, like, walking by, like, confused what you have. But I would say that giving out samples is another great way to deal with that, to be able to show people, like, I have pork sticks with me, or I have, you know, it's hard to do unless you're selling, like, a value add product, like a snack stick or there is obviously some people, we don't do this, but some people are, like, grilling on site or whatever, depending on your market. So I do always, like, wow, smell is a good attractor for people.

Anna Pesek [00:47:23]:
So I think we would do that if we had the ability to. And then I think the signage is important, too, is making sure it's clear what you're selling, how you're selling it. We, this past year, added, like, an a frame sign that had a picture of us on the farm with animals. Um, because I think this is something that maybe varies a lot, depending on the person and the market. Um, but we. We would get a lot, I think, being, like, young women farmers, um, a lot of, like, surprise if that we were the ones, like, actually raising the meat. A lot of people thought, like, oh, you're buying it in, or it was, like, not clear to people what was happening. And so we, like, stuck a picture of us, like, holding, like, a turkey or something or chickens to try to, like, help make the connection that, like, we're.

Anna Pesek [00:48:18]:
I'm the one that does the market, but that I am, like, standing here and selling the product, but I also raise the product. It's not like I'm not. I'm not an employee. So that's it. It's a hard one. And I know people have definitely different experiences with that, but my own experiences, it is. It's challenging. Yeah.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:48:37]:
And I think.

Anna Pesek [00:48:40]:
Go ahead.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:48:41]:
Oh, no, I was going to say.

Anna Pesek [00:48:42]:
I think Matt's advice about the setup is really good. And again, I think it really depends on the kind of market you're at and what kind of space you have available. But, yeah, I think we're always kind of playing around with what's the best way to get people to move through so that they see everything and so we can engage with them the best. But, yeah, it's a constant back and forth. And I see a comment about not being able to give out meet because of regulations. And that's obviously something that does vary a lot from state to state, and you have to get the proper licensing here in Iowa to do that. But, yeah, it can be a good tool.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:49:23]:
How do you utilize your online store to help increase or increase efficiency and then also increase farmers market sales? Do you encourage, like, pre ordering or what's your message method with your online store?

Anna Pesek [00:49:36]:
Yeah, so we do whenever it's possible. And I would say, especially when I'm running some type of bulk deal, I really try to encourage people to buy ahead online. You know, for example, we primarily sell our chicken at the farmer's market as cuts. That's the most profitable for us. And also it's the easiest to transport, obviously, for the most bang for my buck. But we also do sell chickens as, like, whole chickens as well. And so I do really encourage people to purchase ten whole chickens at a time and to do it in a pre order fashion. I just call it a case of whole chickens, and I tell people that it's, they can pick it up at the farmers market.

Anna Pesek [00:50:19]:
So when I have people coming to ask me about whole chickens, that's usually the path I try to push them down. Occasionally, you know, it's someone that really just wants one chicken, and I will bring a few with me for those instances. But when it's someone that's, like, generally just, like, interested in whole chickens, I try to say, um, the best thing to do would be to pre order a case of whole chickens, and I will bring the ten chickens with me to the next market, and I will have them packed up in a box, and you can pay for it online, and I will hand you the box of chickens, and you will walk out with it. And I would say a decent amount of people do options like that, or they'll come and they'll pay with a check. There's sometimes, like, the generational divide between the online pre orders, but that has worked very occasionally. Bigger orders, even like a whole hog, someone will pick up at the market, or a half hog. So I try to get people to do online orders when they can. I have some people that do subscriptions and that will pick up their subscription at the market, or I can encourage them to do that.

Anna Pesek [00:51:23]:
Um, last year we did, uh, we ran a bacon subscription because our bacon was moving so fast at the farmers market. It was kind of constantly sold out. And so we decided to do it as a subscription model. And then there was, like, we were sold out of bacon. But there was a couple lucky customers who had done our bacon subscription and got there once a week, um, you know, one to four pounds, depending on the person. And so that worked really well. It's kind of a way to get people using an online store and coming to see us at the farmer's market, and then they would often buy more at the market. So, yeah, trying different things out.

Anna Pesek [00:52:02]:
It's good, too.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:52:04]:
Yeah, certainly. I think that's something we always try to encourage people to do, is train your customers to order ahead. It makes it easier for you and for them. And obviously, you still do want that customer interaction like Matt was talking about. But, yeah, balancing the efficiency with also the customer engagement is a tough one, so.

Anna Pesek [00:52:29]:
For sure.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:52:30]:
Okay, so you've been going to this one for a few years. Have you had success creating long term customer relationships or converting those farmers market customers into you know, customers that continue to purchase from you throughout the year.

Anna Pesek [00:52:46]:
Yeah. So I would say that that's something that we have started to try to work harder on because it's, it's tough, but we're definitely, we always have a newsletter sign up with us. So I make sure that people at the farmer's market are going to get my weekly emails throughout the year. And I do my best to communicate with people, especially towards the end of the season, that, like, even as the farmers market is over, obviously in our region, like, it takes a break for the winter and we don't attend a winter market. There's not one in Iowa City. Um, I try to encourage people that it's really important to continue supporting us, um, and that it really, we have plenty of other ways to get our meat via shipping and via weekly home delivery. So, um, I would say that we have gotten customers that have stayed really engaged and have continued to purchase from us. Um, I would say it's not necessarily at the same frequency as I see with the farmers market, um, which is in part because people are placing larger orders when they do.

Anna Pesek [00:53:45]:
Um, when they purchase through e commerce, they're probably getting like $200, $100 to $200 at a time and it takes them longer to go through it versus some of those people at a farmer's market are going to be buying, you know, let's say $50 at a time. So I do see that. And then I would say, like, yeah, I mean, I think for the most part, people do stay engaged, but it is kind of figuring out how to convert people into those bigger buying customers is a little bit of a challenge still. And some of it is, I think it is somewhat a different demographic depending on the scenario.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:54:26]:
Yeah, definitely. So one of the things that you mentioned there was like having them sign up for your email list, and that is huge. So kind of going off of that, how do you use both social media and email marketing to, you know, increase your sales before a market or keep engaging with them after?

Anna Pesek [00:54:49]:
Yeah, so, um, I try to post on social media frequently in the lead up to the market, and then when we're there as well, I try to give people a heads up about what we're going to have, especially because, like I said, we produce a lot of things, we have a lot of different options and we're not going to bring every single thing to every market. So that, you know, that plays into the pre orders, too. I do tell people, like, this is generally what we're going to have. If you want something else, like, or if you know, you're going to want like 20 of something, like, please place an order ahead of time. But I do try to advertise that pretty significantly on social media during the lead up, and then I also always include it. I send an email once a week, which, you know, every week I feel like I'm trying to work on getting better and getting more engagement with those. So it's, it's a constant learning, but I do always remind people that we'll be at the market and generally kind of, it's not a huge market, it's not very hard to find us, but, you know, I try to tell people where we're going to be at and that it's a good opportunity to see us. And, yeah, I mean, I do my best with that.

Anna Pesek [00:55:57]:
I think that, like, it's the email marketing, I think is more fruitful than the social media. But the social media posts, I think, you know, they can draw some people and it's a good reminder, I think, again, generational differences. I feel like a lot of the younger folks who follow us are come, come to the market to grab a coffee and socialize and they maybe buy one or two things and then have some more of the hardcore customers who, who come to stock up. I think meet poses some of its own challenges. You know, it's a little bit harder to trudge around with for the rest of your day. So, yeah, we also, we do think we do insulated bags as well, and that's kind of helped, too, with people being more willing to buy a larger quantity, but, yeah, yeah, no, I think.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:56:50]:
That was a really good answer. And one of the things we talk about a lot is just like, you can't remind them enough. Like, multiple reminders throughout the week and leading up to your market is kind of the key to just keep engaging them and keep reminding them. So, yeah, we always encourage you to just multiple times is not enough, so don't feel embarrassed if you feel like you're bothering them. But lastly, to kind of wrap things up, what are the three top things that you would encourage a new vendor or somebody that is returning, but feels like they need a few tips for success? What tips would you give them leading into this farmers market season?

Anna Pesek [00:57:41]:
Yeah, so that's a good question. I think my first tip for people would be to work on your setup ahead of time. You know, it's helpful to kind of play around with things not the morning of the first farmers market to at least have a good idea of how you're going to display things, what you need to bring with you in terms of signage or tablecloth or, like, where you want your scale. Like, I think it's helpful to have a good layout so that you can execute it because, you know, depending on where you are, like, we're dealing, we're leaving for the farmer's market, like before five. And, like, your brain just doesn't always function well, so have a good plan of what you want to do. This doesn't apply to everyone, but it might be helpful for some folks. For, for me personally, I am quite shy and I find the, like, sales part of the farmer's market to be very challenging. And so I think it's actually really helpful to, like, rehearse a little bit of, like, what it's going to feel like.

Anna Pesek [00:58:43]:
It's like being kind of, it's like being an actress. Like, what am I going to say to people, you know, talking yourself in the mirror, like, how am I going to, you know, encourage people to, like, purchase that other thing or to, you know, to feel really confident that, like, it's okay to, like, tell, stay firm in my price or whatever. Like, the farmer's market can bring out a lot of different scenarios and those can be really hard. So I think, like, yeah, like, literally rehearsing is helpful. And then going off of that, feeling really confident about your pricing, I think is key for a farmer's market. Um, one, because if you have to explain it to someone and it's someone that you feel like you want to engage with, um, it's helpful to, to say, like, this is why we do things or this is why it's priced that way. And, you know, if it's someone that's being kind and understanding, they'll, they'll appreciate hearing the explanation. Um, but, you know, it can be easy, depending on where you are and what kind of farmers market it is, it can be easy to feel, like, taggled.

Anna Pesek [00:59:48]:
It can feel easy to, like, capitulate about what you're, what you're selling, especially when you're talking, like, often a high dollar item like meat. And so I know I found myself in scenarios feeling like guilt or bad. And so, yeah, making sure that I have my price sheet with me and I know what I'm charging and feel good before the season starts or raising my prices before the season starts has been really important.

Sydney - ChopLocal [01:00:15]:
Yeah, no, I think those are three really excellent points. So with that, I'm going to move into just a few, like, housekeeping things, but feel free to put questions in the chat if you have them. And I am also going to put a chat in if you could. I know we're kind of moving into the season of like, we won't have webinars for a few months, or if we do, they'll be, you know, a little bit more sparse than they are in the spring and the fall. So I'm going to put a link in the chat. If you have topics that you would be interested in us talking about, please put them on this form right here. We really appreciate it. And not just topics, but if there is somebody specific that you want to hear from, feel free to put that in that survey.

Sydney - ChopLocal [01:01:08]:
So I am also going to share my screen real quick. Like I mentioned, we will kind of be wrapping up our spring webinar series after tonight. So if over the summer you still are looking to kind of work on your direct to consumer meet education, we encourage you again to, to check out our course, meet commerce essentials. And then you can always look on our website, choplocaluniversity.com. We have tons of free and low cost educational resources, so please check those out. And we will also be sending out some free templates that you can use at farmers Market. So a few of the things that Matt and Anna talked about, like here are the cards that we accept. Here is a sign up for our email list or a QR code that they can just sign up right there on the spot.

Sydney - ChopLocal [01:02:06]:
So we will also be sending that out tomorrow as well. And if you need any help, like editing the templates to make them customized to your operation, just let myself or Katie know and we would be happy to help you with that. So with that, please let us know if you have any questions. I will provide contact information for both Anna and Matt in our follow up email. Doesn't look like we have any other questions, but thank you guys for joining us tonight. And thank you to Matt and Anna. I think this was great and we really appreciate you guys joining us.