Project Overview
Information Products
Commodities
Practices
- Farm Business Management: business planning, farmers' markets/farm stands, market study
Summary:
Our preliminary observations were confirmed during the first year of selling our selection of uncommon culinary plants. We saw farmers offering items such as purslane, and persimmons. In the second year, we observed hardy kiwis, and squash blossoms being sold. However, these products were being sold in the same manner as common produce with little acknowledgment of their uniqueness. As a result, customers needed to already be familiar with these plants, possess an adventurous nature, or engage in a conversation with staff who often had only limited knowledge.
This is precisely where this project becomes relevant. Should uncommon culinary plants be marketed in the same way as common produce or are there more effective strategies for presenting and selling them? As we discovered, there are important nuances to how uncommon culinary plants should be marketed.
For clarity, throughout this report we use “uncommon culinary plants” and “uncommon produce” interchangeably. We have defined uncommon culinary plants as a crop with low public awareness, limited commercial production, and minimal presence in mainstream markets. Cannabis, mushrooms and medicinal plants were deemed out-of-scope for this project. Throughout this project, the term “uncommon culinary plants” refers to both the plants and the edible produce harvested from them.
In this project, we identified many nuances and provided suggestions to help farmers who would like to market uncommon culinary plants. We also developed an easy to fill-in-the blank marketing plan template that can be used to stand alone or be inserted into a larger business plan. This marketing plan can be used in its entirety or a farmer can concentrate on a section that challenges them. Tools/aids have also been inserted into the document to provide more helpful information.
Project objectives:
Objective 1: Investigate and evaluate the effectiveness of current methods for marketing uncommon produce. This will provide a collective picture of current marketing practices already being employed and assess if the practice is effective for specialty produce. This project was completed by conducting surveys, participating in numerous conversations with members of various identified customer segments, observing buying behavior at local farmers markets and leading focus groups.
Objective 2: Explore and evaluate new methods of marketing specialty produce. Traditional marketing plans work well for traditional produce but novel or unusual produce may need additional or revised marketing tools. Various uncommon and common culinary plant comparison charts were added to the marketing plant to show the various challenges that farmers face when marketing uncommon culinary plants. This chart contains information on the basic challenge, its marketing impact and a possible solution to address the challenge. Many comparison charts were inserted into the marketing plan to further assist farmers with understanding marketing needs of both types of culinary plants.
Objective 3: Create a practical customizable marketing toolbox designed for marketing unfamiliar produce to customers. The Marketing Plan and Toolbox were created and is attached to this report.