Would You Like Kale with That? or, the Suggestive Sell at a Farmer's Market

Had the privilege of staffing the local JCC Farmer's Market today with Alex. Heard I missed a rousing time at the first Ramsey Farmer's Market!

It was a neat experience, even though the "traffic" was pretty slow. It is a market that Kayam started about three years ago, and it's slowly growing. We sold about $275 worth of lettuce, kale, spring onions, sugar snap peas, strawberries, garlic scapes, mustard greens, beets, pac-choi, and turnips-- not too shabby. It was great chatting with people-- a few people knew exactly what they wanted and what to do with the stuff; many others had questions, were unfamiliar with some of the items and how to prepare them, and were even open to the kind of "suggestive sell" I learned way back in my McDonald's night shift days in Madison, WI.

Over the four hours of the market, we experimented with different ways to display the goods, propping bins up on an angle, pre-packaging some greens while leaving the rest for people to see/pick on their own (we think folks liked seeing the stuff loose but almost all preferred to let us actually bag it up. Interesting.). We decided that for next week, we're going to try to make some laminated signs for each thing that would give folks an idea of how to use it/prepare it. Should be interesting to see if that helps at all.

We'll be donating the rest to a local food pantry, which is cool-- our own version of "leaving the corners of our fields." The mishnah suggests actually leaving stuff in the field and letting the poor come and harvest it on their own; not quite sure how or if that could work practically on this land.