Farmer Spotlight: Dirty Girl Produce

This iconic San Francisco Bay Area Farm took their business online.

photo by Brown Cannon

Dirty Girl Produce is a Certified Organic Farm outside of Santa Cruz, California. They’re well known in the area for their top-tier produce, strawberries and tomatoes. Serving some of the largest markets and well-known restaurants in San Francisco, owner Joe Schirmer shared how they transitioned their long-standing buyer relationships online this summer to keep sales steady despite shutdowns and shifting demand. 

Joe started working on farms in his second year of college. “I kept stumbling across farming,” Joe recounted, “I started interning and then working on Farms in 1992. I began working with a couple of friends that started Dirty Girl Produce in 1997.” When the owners stopped farming, I wanted to ramp it up and keep going --- so I took over Dirty Girl Produce in 1999. Since then, we’ve farmed 20 different parcels over the years. Right now we're doing 40 acres of mixed vegetable row crop. We also sell strawberries and tomatoes—in our area of South Santa Cruz County, you can grow year round.”

Before the pandemic, the Farm served farmers markets and restaurants in the San Francisco area. “San Francisco is a highly literate food town. People are really into food! There's a lot of young people that move there to work in the restaurants, and on their days off they're spending their whole paycheck eating—it’s amazing to be a part of.”

Joe has served as President of the Board of Directors for the SCCFM (Santa Cruz Community Farmers Markets), and sits on the CUESA (Center for Urban Education on Sustainable Agriculture) Board which oversees the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market in San Francisco. 

“Currently, we sell at five farmers markets. On Saturdays, the Ferry Plaza will have up to 20,000 people attending each week, and in the morning it’s a lot of local buyers. We have a huge list of restaurants that we’ve sold to over the years—about 50 were buying from us weekly before the pandemic. We based our whole business model the past 20 years to revolve around those markets and restaurants. 

Roughly 50% of our income came from farmers markets and the remaining 50% came from restaurants and wholesale. Unfortunately, Restaurants are down 90%—there's a trickle of people eating out, but it's nothing like what it was. But, we kept the same footprint. We didn’t stop or shrink. We went for it and we’re selling everything—probably more!”

Joe and his team at Dirty Girl Produce reached out to Barn2Door in Spring 2020, and got set up to bring their farmer market sales and wholesale orders online. Joe shared, “The whole model is evolving so quickly, people were concerned about food scarcity initially. When covid shutdowns happened, I started thinking about all our market customers that are seniors—that aren't going out.”

“It's been good to transition into using Barn2Door for what we call the “box program.” The box program gives us a bunch of retail sales from customers that we were missing at the markets. We used to drive past 100,000 people every Saturday, so as soon as we opened that up for delivery it just exploded. 

People know Dirty Girl Produce in Santa Cruz and San Francisco. Just through social media people will get a hold of us and ask how they can get our food. There's all these people that were buying from us that we had normally been passing by that now had the opportunity to purchase or subscribe to the box program. That spike in demand when everyone was feeling food insecure helped us recover those lost market and restaurant sales. 

My goal is to build the box program and delivery to something we count on month-over-month, so we have a predictable demand. Using Barn2Door to sell boxes, pre-orders and for restaurant buyers as well is next level. A lot of millennials and young people don’t carry cash anymore, and they’re buying everything else online—it’s the direction everything’s going.”

“Using Barn2Door is next level. I’m really excited about getting restaurants to purchase through Barn2Door. There’s a huge difference between someone pre-paying and pre-purchasing versus invoicing them for 30 days. I don't have to borrow as much money when people sign on and they pay for it then. There’s easily 10,000 dollars that we’d be expecting in the next 30 days. Now that same money is in our accounts 4 days in advance. So, in terms of operating capital that’s a huge difference for us.” 

“I would pay ten times more in monthly fees, because the cost is pretty reasonable—especially for the amount of tech support I receive. Whenever I have a question, I can email my Account Manager, chat live online with the Support team. They’re really helpful and get back to you right away. I’m a tech-learner, so the amount of tech support is just clutch, and you really need it going online, in addition to getting our website and social media set up. These are things it would have taken me years to get done, but pandemic forced me to reach out to Barn2Door and make it happen.”

We’re thrilled to support Joe and Dirty Girl Produce, and excited to welcome Joe to the Barn2Door Farm Advisor Network. Watch Joe’s session on building their Brand at the DIRECT Farm Conference. Register for this FREE virtual conference today.

If you’re curious how Barn2Door could support your Farm, you can learn how it works in 5 min.