Maximizing Pricing for Your Farm Products
In this episode of the Direct Farm Podcast, we talk with Peter Bartlett of Bartlett Farms in North Dakota. We discuss their Farm’s mission to promote health through food, their highly effective marketing efforts, the offering of convenience in a sparsely populated state, and their commitment to establishing the value of their brand and products.
Bartlett Farms is a diversified family farm offering raw dairy and meats. With an expansive subscription program, convenient pickups and delivery options, Bartlett Farms continues to experience success and growth year over year for their Farm business.
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Richard Weisberg: Well, welcome to the Direct Farm Podcast. I'm Richard, your host for today's episode. We have a great conversation for you today with one of our newest Farm Advisors, Peter Bartlett from Bartlett Farms.
Welcome Peter.
Peter Bartlett: Thank you. It's good to be here.
Richard Weisberg: Yeah. We're excited to be able to chat now. could you start by telling us a little bit more about Bartlett Farms and introduce the Farm?
Peter Bartlett: For sure. So we are a diversified family Farm. Uh, we are located in the north central part of North Dakota, two miles south of the Canadian border. So [00:01:00] basically, uh, we're about an hour and a half from the geographical center of North America, about as far from the coast as you can get either direction. We have a various product offerings, but we do primarily meats and milk. Um, there's all kinds of meats including Turkey, beef, pork, chicken. Um, and then we do the dairy, which is a, a raw milk dairy. So that's kind of our main emphasis.
Um, we started out as a homestead. We moved here from Fargo. Uh, my dad taught engineering at N D S U, North Dakota State for 17 years, but as a result of that experience, he really didn't want his sons to grow up in that kind of culture. We wanted to do something where we could all work together, and so in 2004 we moved to Bottineau.
We picked a place with hills, trees, and lakes and just kind of established 160 acres of pasture and rolling hills, and we wanted to grow our own [00:02:00] food. That's kind of how our Farm started. From there, we started getting people asking us if they could buy local chickens. Mm-hmm. Eggs, and kind of snowballed from there.
So that was 2004. I was 10 years old. Uh, it was kind of a fun transition for us. We were at a stage where each of my brothers and I were really seeking out our own interests. My dad really encouraged us to, follow what it was that we felt God had gifted us with. Mm-hmm. So my three brothers have moved on to other areas. My wife and I continue to manage the Farm with my parents. I remember being about, uh, five years old, telling my mom that I wanted to be a zookeeper when I grew up. So here we are. Perfect. And I have a zoo of all, all sorts of animals, so
Richard Weisberg: That's awesome. Well, uh, you know, your dream came true in to a certain extent.
Peter Bartlett: It continues to be a dream come true. Yep.
Richard Weisberg: I love that. That's awesome. I think I mentioned this to you before, but, um, there's no other industry that I've seen, [00:03:00] especially working with countless Farms that I've had the opportunity to work with where there's that legacy, it's passed down from generation to generation.
So, love that your dad made that decision, a long time ago and um, kind of changed the trajectory here and, and really built something that, can be passed down the generations. I think that's really, really cool.
Peter Bartlett: Yes.
Richard Weisberg: Now you mentioned it started as a Farmstead, it changed over and grown over time. Um, what was really the impetus behind that? The changing and the growing there?
Peter Bartlett: Well, to begin with, dad was more so an educator, so he was teaching online courses before online teaching was actually popular. Mm-hmm. So, kind of a pioneer in that sense. The transition happened. More so by necessity, um, because we were growing our own food, didn't have a lot of far of experience in, uh, even running our own business, um, or Farming.
Uh, my dad was not a Farmer. My grandparents, neither grandparents Farmed. Um, my dad's grandpa had a small [00:04:00] hobby Farm in New England but we didn't have that experience, so we came into it kind of just learning as we went. So the transition would be, Really making ends meet. Okay. I think we, we saw the opportunity, Joel Salatin's books.
Um, his book You Can Farm was a real kind of setting a vision for what could be in, establishing direct marketing. Mm-hmm. Uh, I think that was a key resource that we found early on. There was kind of a, a homesteading community that was a building at the time. I know a lot of other direct marketing Farms kind of started in that same timeframe and really back then there wasn't that much grass-fed, grass-finished meats available.
And so if you wanted those things, um, you really had to go to the Farm. So Michael Pollen's book, the Omnivore's Dilemma that really kind of challenged the food industry and we happened to be transitioning to the homestead at that time. So there's kind of this [00:05:00] shift in the market where people wanted to buy more from Farms.
And that's what propelled us in that direction. And once we saw it could be a viable way to go, we, we all kind of worked together and made it happen.
Richard Weisberg: That's awesome. Now, your Farm has truly, truly found success in your local community. Your, your Farm brand is a staple to a lot of folks in your area. Um, and a large part of that is your mission.
Um, tell us a little bit about your mission.
Peter Bartlett: So the biggest problem as we see it in a lot of our culture today comes down to health and the ability for people to really function, and thrive. And so one of the challenges that faces most people is the rise of food sensitivities, food allergies, inability to eat gluten, to have dairy.
You know, you go to the grocery store and you see soy milk, almond milk, pea milk, hemp milk, all this kinds of [00:06:00] stuff. And you have to scratch your head and ask, why is this here? And that's where it has come to really be our mission to bring foods from our Farm that are designed specifically to help heal the body.
And we really try to frame it in such a way that people understand, here's a solution when the dairy industry has pasteurized everything for so long, it has removed the enzymes and the digestive ability for people to break down lactose. And now you have a generation of people who think dairy is bad, but in, in effect it is real dairy, unprocessed, raw milk that will actually be the key to helping them, find it that healing.
So yeah, getting back to real foods. Everything we do and uh, everything we sell on our, in our Farm, if you browse our store, you'll find that we're focused on reducing toxins. You know, whether that's vaccines, antibiotics, GMOs, all the chemicals that would be [00:07:00] used in a conventional setting and then boosting nutrients.
So we really believe that a well-nourished body should be able to heal itself, and in that way food serves as medicine. So we can kind of target the market by coming to it with a mission. Mm-hmm. To help raise the next generation with a healthier diet and really address one of the biggest crisis of our day in health.
Yeah. So that's, that's in a nutshell, that's kind of how we think about our mission. Mm-hmm.
Richard Weisberg: I'm, I'm really excited to hear about the health forward and, and food as medicine. Um, and dairy is such a big example with a lot of the Farms I work with how beneficial raw dairy can be and how accessible it is for people's bodies, even if they have, or think they have some type of lactose intolerance.
Now do you think that that health forward mission is really what resonates and why do you think that lands so well?
Peter Bartlett: Yeah, that's a good question. I really think a lot of [00:08:00] times Farmers get into marketing and they wanna tell people how they Farm. Mm-hmm. And that's, that's where they start when they want to communicate.
And to the average person, when it comes down to spending money. That's not their first top of mind issue, it's become more of a thing to support, you know, Farms for ethical reasons, but especially starting out, you know, 10 years ago, it was primarily, I would say, building a bridge to the people who really needed to know why, why this food was important. Mm-hmm. So when we look at our customers, we really have a persona that we're going for. And it's really the, the young mom who is raising a couple kids and experiencing all the challenges that comes from having, you know, young kids in today's world.
So many things that our parents and grandparents didn't experience, whether that's childhood diabetes or cancer happening at earlier [00:09:00] and earlier ages. You know, things that just don't make sense. Mm-hmm. And then they're the ones doing the research to go look up on Instagram, gut health or, you know, solutions to leaky gut and thyroid issues and all these things. So they are the ones who are mostly urban, mostly, not connected to the Farm. And so we really felt that in order to build the bridge to the ideal customer, we needed to communicate in a way that was really focused on their problems. So, And as a result, we do support and practice, you know, organic regenerative Farming. But we do not see that as like the one thing that's going to connect us to that customer who's dealing with the problem, um, that they feel every day.
Richard Weisberg: Yeah, certainly. And there's, there's two questions that come out of that. The ideal customer is something I, I encourage a lot of the Farms I gotta work with to consider.
How did you go about [00:10:00] identifying your ideal customer and kind of finding out who you wanna market to? Um, I get that question quite a bit.
Peter Bartlett: Yeah. So when we started, we were the only raw milk Farm listed on, for example, realmilk.com, a Farm listing service, and back in 2009 when we sold our first cow share, which is the model that we've used to date, We just posted it on there and we started seeing people coming to us because it was really at a time where there was not much awareness about that in general, and especially in the Midwest, when you look at, per consumer, per purchasing patterns, you go to the East or West Coast and you see a lot more direct to market Farms, you see a lot more innovation happening. But out in the Midwest, there's a lot of tradition and family, culture that is Tater Tot Casserole and, Lefsa and you know, meat and potatoes.
So like that's the kind of thing that is new to the [00:11:00] Midwest where it's not so new in the East coast. So, um, I think that the way we really built out who we were targeting happened, kind of incidentally, accidentally, basically seeing who was coming to us at the beginning and then really seeing who it was that had the potential.
And now I kind of wanted to pivot here and say too, our pricing structure mm-hmm. Has been really important. Um, we've been doing this now for over, I guess be 15 years or so, well since 2009. And we've really had to take a hard look at what makes us profitable and sustainable. And so we started out we copied a model in from a Farm in Virginia who was taking prepayments for a quarter at a time. And it was like $14 a month for a share of a gallon a week, or a gallon every other week or whatever it was. It was like $7 a gallon. Mm-hmm. Um, what we found was that worked for [00:12:00] a while.
I was single, I was 15 years old, hand milking two cows. And at that point, I didn't have any expenses and it was pretty much just, do what you can do to get it sold. Right. And then we realized that we needed another cow and we needed to buy hay. And we needed so many things that come along with that.
So every time we reached a point where it was, what are we going to do? We can't make this go, we would re-look at our, our pricing and really take a hard look at it. And at first it's super hard to make the decision to raise your price. But early on, we found a book that was called Worth Every Penny by Sarah Petty.
Mm-hmm. And she talks about building out value rather than focusing on price. And so that was kind of our approach was to say, we're gonna have to charge more and so it went up to $16 a gallon at first. And so we went what are we gonna do to give them more value? Mm-hmm. And then that's when we offered [00:13:00] delivery was one of those value options. Um, we basically said, what is it gonna take to make this much money worth it to that consumer? Um, so now today our milk is $25 a gallon. And we're marketing it as an all-in-one. You get glass bottles, you get delivery to your door, you get text notifications, you get email reminders. If your milk goes bad, Before seven to 10 days, we'll replace it for free. Wow.
And we are focused on maintaining that value so that way we connect with the customer and we actually filter out a lot of those people who would say, oh, I just want that milk the way I had it growing up. You know, they're not gonna pay that much for it cuz they don't really value it that much.
But when the people realize that here's a Farm that knows that my kids need safe alternatives to dairy [00:14:00] and this is essential for their health, they're willing to pay $25 a gallon and that helped us kind of in a sense, weed out people who didn't care as much. Yeah. So that we can really serve them.
So that's kind of wraps up a bunch of different things, but that's how we've seen a lot of success.
Richard Weisberg: Well, I, I love that too, that, um, pricing is a question I get quite a bit from other Farms that I work with. Um, a lot of folks are afraid of losing customers if they raise their prices, but you look across the board for their expenses and running the business, as you know, those costs aren't going down by anyway.
Yeah. And so, um, I love that perspective of, of baking in the value there and, and making sure that the folks that are excited to sign up. See the value in everything that comes with, with a subscription with you, uh, now with how important your mission is and, um, as you were saying, how unique that is for most of the folks in the Midwest here.
How did you go about sharing your [00:15:00] mission? Um, getting it out in front of the ideal customer and, and raising awareness of what you're doing?
Peter Bartlett: We started by working to connect with people who we would realize would be able to talk to other people. So one of the things Joel Salatin talked about was talking to any group that will let you come in front of them.
Mm-hmm. Um, so before Facebook advertising and before social media was even a thing, the strategy was really to connect with influencers in real life. And so we held meetings in Bismark, in Williston, we basically do a seminar. Um, that was one way, I think earlier on it was a lot more word of mouth. And it still, it still is a lot of word of mouth. I think the word of mouth has changed now. So word of mouth happens through social media. Yep.
Um, but one way that we like to think about [00:16:00] it is think of a bicycle tire or a bicycle wheel. There's the hub, there's the spokes, and there's the rim. So in the hub you have just like a handful of things that really make a big impact, that are costly. You can't do a lot of 'em. Uh, so that would be include like , customer appreciation day at the Farm, farm tours, we've adopted a product launch model, so our email customers will once a year or twice a year, we'll send out kind of a information and lead up to like a pre-order event that's been really effective. Those are a couple things that really take a lot of focus.
And then in the spoke area, you know, it covers more area of that bicycle wheel. Um, we think of some of the things that are a little bit more costly and time consuming, but not, not incidental, so like things like sending him a handwritten thank you card at the end of the year during the holiday season, things like going to show up at a CrossFit gym and have a table for [00:17:00] the members there just to get exposure to your brand. Yeah. We did that a few times and have, you know, some of our best customers that have been with us many years that came as a result of that.
And we're very thankful to the manager there that let us do that. Chiropractors, we have one particular that we have really built a good connection with, and so we go to their customer appreciation day and brings some goats and animals to have as a petting zoo and that just builds connections and it kind of spreads the word. Um, yeah. But then, then the rim activities are things that just happen. They're, you know, inexpensive, but they happen regularly, so that would include social media, you know, face-to-face interactions, meeting people in person at the pickup group or pickup drops.
Um, but that's kind of how we think of our marketing is like the big things, the not so big things, and then the small things.
Richard Weisberg: Perfect. I love it. And that's, that's a great perspective and pneumonic device, if you will, um, to really remember how you can reach folks in different ways, and you don't have to only lean on these big events that are really costly [00:18:00] and time consuming.
You know, those touches at the rim of the wheel, like we're saying for deliveries or any face to face time you have are, are also very, very important. Um, now being, you know, located as you said, um, right smack dab in the North American continent, just about a pretty sparsely populated part of North Dakota.
So what are some challenges you've faced and how did you overcome them being geographically located like that?
Peter Bartlett: The biggest challenge, so early on it was really just, Bootstrapping our way to make it work. So it was, local people, we went to the Farmer's market a few times, um, started to see that our friends and neighbors in the immediate area weren't necessarily people who understood the benefits of you know, food as medicine. I think that's changing. I think that we're seeing more of that coming in. But we realized we needed to reach out to the major cities in North Dakota, so we used pickup groups as [00:19:00] A beginning point. Mm-hmm. So back at the beginning, we had people drive an hour and a half from Minot to come to our Farm to pick up for about six or eight different families, and then we kind of monitored and helped organize whose turn it was to pick up.
That worked for a little while, but as you would probably realize, people's schedules are not easy to organize and so that only lasted so long before we realized we're really not gonna be able to serve them long term unless we drove that ourselves. So we added a delivery fee and we drove that ourselves.
We kind of started out by saying, Hey, we need $12 per customer but if you get more than 10 customers we'll make that $6 or whatever. And that was kind of how we started. And then once we realized that there's only so many people that care in that area, we really needed more and actually it was the customers asking us to come further, so we would have. We started delivering to Minot and then we would have people driving, you know, two hours in addition to that [00:20:00] to come pick up from us in Minot and they would say, well, how many do we need in Williston to have you come there?
So that happened right before the oil boom and the Bakken oil fields. And that was a big player, um, that we saw a lot of influx from people in Colorado and Kentucky and other places that had raw milk, but they would come to the oil field and they would say, Hey, I can't find anything good in the grocery store, we wanna find fresh food, so how can you get there? So we kind of morphed from that into delivering ourselves. So we maintain, our delivery routes, that's been probably the biggest tool to sustainably reach customers with products that are fresh. At the time, shipping was not feasible. I think that's changed a lot in the past 10 years, there's a lot more things that are cost effective for smaller Farms. Um, but we started out delivering and so we basically deliver six major routes [00:21:00] twice a month, and that establishes kind of our presence in those areas.
Um, the furthest we go, it was from the Farm to Fargo. We used to drive that ourselves, which was four and a half hours. Um, but that gets to be a long day. And if we stayed overnight, that's an extra fee for a hotel. So we, we found some customers actually, we, we reached out to those customers and said, Hey, does anybody want to drive?
And we've now hired about seven, part-time delivery drivers that'll meet us at the pickup points or at a rendezvous, and then we'll pass off parts of the delivery, and then they take them to customers homes. So we're not on the road so much right now. But a lot of that has been very helpful to use software to get us to reach those customers.
So that's probably one of the biggest things, it's been just connecting with customers.
Richard Weisberg: Yeah, I, well, I think that's great . I work with lots of Farms that are in really rural areas as well, but I like how, [00:22:00] how creative you had to be the necessity of reaching folks in the further off metropolitan areas wasn't, um, necessarily an obstacle in of itself. Mm-hmm. That was the objective.
How did you determine pricing for like your delivery fees? It's a, it's a question I get quite a bit as well, many folks are a little wary of driving off, sales by having delivery fees. So how did you determine the pricing for these?
Peter Bartlett: At the beginning. We just needed to cover gas and so we said, okay, what's the least amount we could do? And we weren't really tracking our time. I think a lot of Farmers fail in that way they don't count their time. So we made that mistake early on, but it was a part of the process. We basically said, okay, it's gonna take us, you know, 60, $75 to get to this destination. How many customers do we have in that area? Okay, if we charge this much, it's gonna cover our gas to get there?
That's where we started. So, Later on, we realized that if we were going to raise our price, just like I had mentioned [00:23:00] earlier, we wanted to be able to add value, right? And we, we see a lot of software and other companies, you think of, uh, subscription model companies, they're basically wrapping all of their services into one price. And so that was kind of the thinking.
There's a good book, Seth Godin's Purple Cow, it's a classic marketing book. Basically says that if your product doesn't sell itself, then you need to reconsider it. You can't just make your product sound good enough to be popular, you have to create an idea virus that can go viral. So when we saw a lot of subscription services coming in, like Stitch Fix and Netflix and, you know, Even windows, everything would becoming subscriptions. Um, the idea that I had was, why don't we create a subscription service like that, but for Farm stuff? So we called it the Basic Plan, the Family Plan, and we basically wrapped everything up into one.
And we said, rather than focusing on [00:24:00] the price, because people have to do a lot of work, when they say, okay, it's gonna be $16, and then it's gonna be plus $6 for delivery, and that's two deliveries a month and then that's four gallons. And so then they start thinking all about the prices, right? We wanted to shift that to basically the, the flow would be state the price and then build out the value.
So even if the price is high, we wanted to create a clean number that we could then build out the value after. So we say, okay, it's gonna be $50 a month. You're gonna get two deliveries of four glass, half gallon bottles delivered to your doorstep. You know? And when people think about it, they think, okay, they're already paying for subscription services that are, you know, $50 a month-ish. If you disconnect from dollars per gallon, then the customer is seeing, okay, I can fit this in my budget and I'll get this value delivered. Mm-hmm. So [00:25:00] to this day, we don't have a separate delivery fee. We've been able to understand our costs enough that we can say, we need this many customers paying this much price, and we'll put that as a part of our overhead expenses.
So that's a marketing decision that we've made to keep the focus on the value and not on the delivery price. So we were a little hesitant when gas was going up and we might have had to make a decision, but we ended up being able to make it so.
Richard Weisberg: Perfect. Well, and you, you touched on a few examples then. Um, the FAMs here at Barn2Door, like to provide to other producers when they're considering their subscriptions, and that's the subscriptions that their customers are already signed up for.
Mm-hmm. Netflix, Spotify, like you said, windows nowadays. Um, so I'm really happy to hear that you, you took a great model that works with, um, other industries and have been able to apply it to your business here.
Now, Let's back pedal to the day that you get started with [00:26:00] Barn2Door. You know, what, what made you sign up in the first place, which brought you to, to Barn2Door?
Peter Bartlett: We had been paying another company that did delivery software and the only reason we chose them was because they had recurring subscriptions. Um, back when e-commerce was beginning to be I guess made accessible, to people, you didn't have the option to make subscriptions easy. Barn2Door was probably the first and one of the best examples of someone who could communicate the value of subscriptions to a Farmer audience.
So we were paying a lot more for the previous company, they had very poor support, they had very clunky software, we had a lot of manual things that we had to do. Um, and it did not have full text integration, and, um, a lot of the sync that Barn2Door has with Mailchimp and it was a [00:27:00] kind of an all-in-one, but it was a bit more enterprise level and we weren't ready for that.
So, we made the decision to part ways and start with Barn2Door specifically because it allowed us to do subscriptions simply and easily. At the beginning it was a restricted to 12 months, so we still used that on occasion, but we did have some people that were a little bit surprised when that 12 months came up and they had to renew. Now that there's an ongoing option, we've switched almost all of our products to ongoing subscriptions. What that does is it really helps with cashflow, it allows us to project where we'll be if sales maintain at this rate, it helps us focus on building the relationship with the customer to make sure that they are happy with their subscription.
But I think that the Barn2Door software, really does a good job making it simple and being familiar to people who are shopping like at Target or Amazon. The checkout process [00:28:00] doesn't require an account prior to checkout. You can basically check out as a guest, so that was an advantage, we basically can collect new customers that in a previous software and in other softwares would require a very lengthy setting up of an account and we felt that was a, a barrier to new customers. So immediately after signing up, we did see a very significant growth. We've grown, I don't know, 40%, 50% a year almost since starting with Barn2Door. Not all of it related to the software, we've also grown in a lot of our business knowledge. But I think that Barn2Door has helped streamline the conversion process. So taking somebody from being aware of our business and being interested to actually making a purchase.
So now we basically look at our inbox and we see when somebody signs up, there's an inbox says, [00:29:00] You've got a new customer, the start date for their order, and then there's ongoing subscription and we put that into our database and we say, here we go. Let's give them the welcome packet to make sure they're aware of how to return bottles, how to make sure that they know when our delivery is coming and all those things.
Richard Weisberg: Awesome. Wow. Um, it sounds like, uh, the customers responded really well, and especially I know it's, it seems to be a point of concern or at least a apprehension for existing producers to move to a different e-commerce solution, especially one that their customers are accustomed to.
So I'm really happy to hear that, that there was such a positive reaction. Your customers seemed to have picked it up really well. And, as you've said, you've seen some terrific growth, um, in part, I think. As you mentioned too, the convenience and, buyer familiarity with an online platform like that.
Peter Bartlett: Yeah, I think that the transition is one of the best things about it is that it is very clear. One of the things that we appreciate is that when an order change is made, [00:30:00] it sends an email to the customer to tell them about this change. Whereas if you're just making edits to somebody's order and they don't realize, oh, this is a change, or, uh, a subscription was canceled or an order was skipped, they automatically get that notification.
Whereas if they don't. They're left in the dark.
Richard Weisberg: Right, right, right. Well we've, we've chatted about it quite a bit, but there are really two things that stand out in your online store- you've got tons of subscriptions and you've got a great variety of fulfillment options here. We've dug into subscriptions a little bit, um, but I'd like to chat a little bit about your fulfillments. Why are you offering both delivery and pickup? You know, why not just lean into a delivery option or something of that effect?
Peter Bartlett: Good question. A lot of our, because we are very rural in North Dakota, we realize that there's a lot of people and places we can't reach with the delivery. So if we were using, you know, FedEx or some other shipping [00:31:00] option, they would handle that we could probably reach more of those people. Since we're relying on glass bottles, we want to have those bottles returned, that gives us a reason that we want to make sure we connect, you know, face-to-face or with drivers to the customer's address. So people will actually drive upwards of two hours to meet us at one of our pickup locations, two and a half hours from the Farm.
So that's, that's pretty common for us and has been maintained for, 5, 6, 8, 10 years for some customers. So they find the value is worth it. They're still, paying essentially the same price as everyone else and they're able to meet us, so that's the primary reason we offer a pickup group locations.
We would, we would lean toward exclusively home deliveries, but where we don't reach those areas, we do ask people to come meet us. So that's been the reason we have those two options.
Shipping is something that's coming soon. [00:32:00] Um, we don't have a lot of inventory and ability to do that yet, but we're, we're refining our packaging and getting our process down to be able to have orders shipped out.
Richard Weisberg: Great. Sounds good. Now, when it comes to determining these pickup locations, especially reaching some folks up to, you know, four and a half, five hours away from the Farm itself, what have you found to be the best way to, to run a pickup location and, you know, how do you choose these locations?
Peter Bartlett: Good question. I think the biggest factor that we found that helps us in choosing a location is, well, convenience for the customer. So want a lot of parking space if possible. But then also brand association. So we're gonna be telling people about this pickup location frequently, and we want to be somewhere where we can say, you know, this is a familiar place, people will recognize it, they'll know immediately where to go so there's not, you know, two different stores of the same name in the same town. [00:33:00] Um, so for example, we've use Panera parking lot in Minot or, uh, natural Grocers parking lot in Grand Forks or, uh, Terry's Health Products in Bismarck, um, just things that are associated with the same values that we want to convey with our business so that people will recognize, and I think that actually pairs well and the other retailers really like that because we're bringing people to their parking lot and they end up shopping.
Richard Weisberg: Yeah. That's a great point, and I like keeping the, the values aligned with some of these other drop locations as well. You're not rolling up to Walmart for example.
Peter Bartlett: Yes, yes. I think that can have, you know, there's advantages about convenience and other things, but I think at the end of the day, we want to be positioning ourselves as a, a leader and a person who really values the things that we want our customers to value.
So, As far as managing a pickup location, a few practical things that we [00:34:00] use- we don't have currently any refrigerated vehicles. That's one thing that actually has been a benefit to us. We hire drivers who will use their own vehicle. So think Uber for raw milk. Yeah. A carrier service where it's a subcontractor, you are basically paid hourly plus mileage. Um, we pay $16 an hour, plus the IRS going rate for mileage, and then you just show up at our drop site, and then we take our coolers that are packed with ice and product, and then pass them off. So our transport to the pickup locations is just in a cargo van and then those same coolers can be just set up along the van and then orders served out.
I usually review the pickup before arriving at the location, and then I work on memorizing customer names and reviewing their orders in [00:35:00] advance so you can really engage with them on a personal level and say, Hey, I brought you this thing you ordered and don't forget this and Just get to know the customer in that way.
So it works as as feedback too, because we get to engage with our customers face-to-face and then we take their ideas and, and make them part of our business.
Richard Weisberg: Yeah. Well, and I love that as well. I wanna, it's a terrific idea just to take that extra step to try to remember their names, remember their faces, have that human to human touch.
Um, And it doesn't take long. Right. Just to mm-hmm. Put that little ounce of effort in. Um, now when it comes to your deliveries, some Farmers I work with are a bit reluctant to start offering delivery. Um, I mean, it sounds like you've seen a ton of success with the program. Aside from the shipping, um, that you'll be expanding, are you looking at maybe expanding delivery in the future or continuing to lean into that?
Peter Bartlett: Yes. I think that we want to bring the milkman back. Yes. I think that's something that our is called, is very needed in our age. [00:36:00] We really saw during Covid as well that even the carrier services were affected logistically and they couldn't manage, basically supply chain issues. So if we own our own infrastructure and have built relationships with drivers and can get our product out, if something happens or a natural disaster or something else, we can always reach our customers and market our product. So it's a safety thing. As for us, I think it does help that we are a dairy, a perishable product. You know, you need to have it regularly. Most of our deliveries occur every other week. It's been a bit more sustainable for us to go every other week rather than weekly just because of the distance that we cover. So definitely will remain a big part of what we do.
Richard Weisberg: I love it. Now you mentioned, um, a little earlier that, you know, this ongoing subscriptions, um, the buyer adoption, buyer convenience, have really helped your business.
[00:37:00] But, you know, in what other ways has Barn2Door helped you save time and made managing your Farm easier?
Peter Bartlett: I think that if you were to look at our business systems the Barn2Door platform really plugs in best to lead conversion and fulfillment. So, we did a coaching program through the Emith Worldwide, it's a business consulting group and there's a book that goes with it called the E-Myth. Um, basically. Helping people to build a business that's systematized so that you're not people dependent, your system's dependent. So when we found Barn2Door, we realized that it really connected with the same level of systems based thinking that we're developing in our entire business.
As a Farm, we use pasture-based systems and regenerative systems, working with nature to harness the carbon sequestration process and harness the water cycling and all these other [00:38:00] systems that are involved in nature. But then we're bringing it to the customer too. So we're taking kind of that model of rhythms and routines and we're building out the way we do it here.
So when Barn2Door, the customer who is made aware of us, you know, through social media, through word of mouth, through perhaps a Facebook ad, they'll come to purchase a product. Then immediately each product page, it serves as a landing page essentially. So think of a funnel, basically once they're on that product, they're able to have a clear call to action buy now, once they're, once they've made that decision to click the button, it offers a very clear workflow to say you want it pickup or delivery. And if, depending on where they're located, they will see the options and then walks them through any order delivery instructions and then checkout. So once that checkout button is hit, that sends us an email, it also populates the [00:39:00] order fulfillment screen, and we get to have a summary of whose products to be ordered, and if it's recurring subscription, we can see all the details for each person's order. They can see that from their end as well. But then, we have route sheets, integration with Routific is great, we rely on that every day practically, and so you just hit one button, it syncs all of those orders to a map and a routing software to give us the most efficient way to do that. We actually hired somebody to do a lot of that in the backend. So we can just come to the delivery with a route sheet ready and a route plan ready.
So taking it the next step into fulfillment, we're able to match our packing to the orders. We do a, a proofing process where we make sure that the customer's orders, especially because we're handing off batches of orders to other [00:40:00] drivers, we have to make sure that everybody's orders are packed individually and then sent out.
So I would say building out the systems that are involved in a business, Barn2Door has saved us a lot of time in automating everything from the customer's purchase point to delivering it to their door.
Richard Weisberg: I love the sound of that. Well, as our newest member of the Farm Advisor Network, what are you most excited for joining the team here?
Peter Bartlett: We've always been excited to share what we do and why we do it. Yeah. And I think that being a mission oriented brand and really believing that food has the power, through God's grace to change people's lives, we're excited to be reaching more people with that message and helping more Farmers to connect with their customers.
I think that at the end of the day, we're successful when customers find healing through real food. [00:41:00]
Richard Weisberg: Well, I tell you we're pretty excited having you join in the Farm Advisor Network as well. If I, if I may say so. Um, I think you've got a wonderful background, you're eager to learn and share that knowledge.
Um, and so we're, we're fortunate, um, and the other Farms are gonna be fortunate to be able to chat with you. So what's next? What are some of your goals for Bartlett Farms this coming year?
Peter Bartlett: Well one of the biggest things as a challenge on the dairy is just the rhythms and the constant things that need to be done. So one of our goals is to create more margin. I think we have some objectives and goals in our business planning that really make it so we want to be able to not depend on our own labor, but to create a place where that's labor can be, you know, interchangeable. So we're working on a new barn, we're working on a pipeline system to make that milking process easier. Um, we just got a bottling machines we're really excited about upping our glass [00:42:00] bottles, we look forward to expanding our delivery areas. Um, I think that we're seeing a lot more Farms come into this space. There was just a new law passed in this legislative session that will allow direct sale versus, cow share model. So we will be taking advantage of every opportunity to make raw milk available to people and if that means more presence at Farmer's markets and more home deliveries, that's what we're here for here to do.
Richard Weisberg: Great. Yeah, I remember you were mentioning that. Um, it's pretty exciting bill was passed in North Dakota there, so awesome opportunity for you to, um, continue to help folks in, in your area there.
I wanna extend my thanks to Peter for joining us on this week's podcast episode. Here at Barn Door, we are humbled to support thousands of Farms across the country, including Bartlett Farms.
If you want to connect with Peter and other Farm Advisors, attend [00:43:00] Barn2Door Connect. Register for weekly sessions at barn2door.com/connect. And for more information on Bartlett Farms, you can follow them on Instagram, @ndbartlettfarms, thank you for tuning in, and we'll see you next time.