Simplify Wholesale & Retail Orders
On today's episode, James and Joe of Dirty Girl Produce discuss how software can simplify the management of Wholesale and Retail Accounts for Farms.
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[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Independent Farmer Podcast, the go to podcast for do it yourself farmers who are taking control of their own business, skipping the middleman and selling direct to local consumer and wholesale buyers. This podcast is hosted by Barn2Door, the number one business tool for independent farmers to manage their business, promote their brand and sell online and in person.
Let's dive in to today's Independent Farmer Podcast.
James Maiocco: Welcome to the Independent Farmer Podcast. I'm James, the Chief Operating Officer at Barn2Door and your host for today's episode.
As many of our listeners may be aware, Barn2Door offers an all in one business solution for farmer selling direct, online and in person. In today's conversation we get a chance to talk with [00:01:00] Joe at Dirty Girl Produce which is based in Santa Cruz, California. Joe is a part of our Farm Advisory Network and has worked with us since 2020 and has become an advisor, advising several farmers who work with Barn2Door.
I'm excited to talk to Joe today about serving wholesale buyers and balancing wholesale and retail commitments and what he's learned over the last four years working with Barn2Door. Welcome Joe, it's great to see you again.
Joe Schirmer: Great. Thanks for having me, James. Good to see you, talk to you again.
James Maiocco: Well, hey, you've been working on a farm for many years, and I know some of the history, but for some of our listeners who may not know the history of Dirty Girl Produce, maybe you can start there first for folks to maybe share a little bit about your history and how you got involved with Dirty Girl Produce to begin with.
Joe Schirmer: Sure. Yeah. So, in my college days, I ended up completing a four year bachelor of arts independent studies at UCSC, which was in ecopsychology. And that was connection of humans and [00:02:00] nature and how humans need nature and how nature needs humans and you name it, you know, and I was just, it was pretty broad.
And, passed it pretty wide. I ended up with an internship at the homeless garden here in Santa Cruz, thinking I would understand how the influence of nature and gardening were helping people that were houseless. And so, I went into it. And then when I got into it, now a really good close friend of mine, Jane Friedman was the garden manager and she's just a very charismatic, awesome person that everybody loves.
She's a yoga teacher now and life coach. And she was a garden manager and she just, everybody came to that garden from all over to see Jane and to be a part of the garden. And I just got the horticultural bug, you know, I wasn't planning on that at all. But once you start, you come to the farm or your garden and you see that your broccoli plant has grown and you're like, what?
You know, you're like a little kid, right? And so, I just caught that big that year. And I was my senior year in college, I was a intern and intern coordinator with the Homeless Garden [00:03:00] Project. And from there I was just set because I met all these people that worked on organic farms through the year and then took the winter off and traveled and just this whole demographic of people that I never knew about.
You know, I didn't ever know that farming was cool. I grew up with a lot of conventional Brussels sprout farms and conventional strawberry farms, and they looked kind of like factories out in the land. You know, they didn't seem very appealing at all to me. And so, from there, I interned on farms.
I ended up doing the UCSC agroecology program, and when I did the program, I think in 95 or 96, that's when Jane and her good friend, my good friend, Allie, they started Dirty Girl Produce and they did it for two years. I traveled around working on other farms and then I decided, Hey, you know what?
I'm gonna go back home. I'm gonna work for these two cause they're awesome. And they super just inspired me to be a farmer. I probably wouldn't be a farmer without those two. And so, I worked for them for two years. They got burned out and they just kind of passed the torch to me and I kept the brand Dirty Girl.
I [00:04:00] kept the two main farmer's markets they had, which is the Ferry Plaza in San Francisco, which has a huge reach to all these restaurants, and a lot of retail. And then also in the East Bay of Berkeley, Tuesday Farmer's Market, same thing, smaller, but, huge reach of the whole Bay Area, the San Francisco Bay Area, those two little markets, and they were on three acres back then, and we've gone up to, you 40 down to 20.
We're going back up to 45 this year, and, you know, we really changed a lot. We just grow row crop organic veggies, you know, normal old stuff we don't even have any tree crops. Strawberries, tomatoes, carrots and lettuce, normal stuff, right? But we do a really good job, make it really, really high end.
And that's what we do. We've kept it pretty much similar, just scaled up in a way that was mid sized farm, I'd say, I think we're definitely small, but I know a lot of people that are a lot smaller and I know a lot of people that are way bigger, right.
And doing a totally different economy scale. So, that's just kind of what we're doing. And so, I've been running Dirty Girl since 2000 on my own. And, here we are [00:05:00] today, branching off from the old analog days of scratching everything on pieces of paper, to get everything on a computer, right?
James Maiocco: Yeah, pretty big change, I imagine, from when you first started back in 1999 and, like you said, taking it over in 2000. I'm kind of curious, you know, from when you went into Farming full time to where you are today is like, is this what you expected? I mean, would you've ever foreseen that your, your business should grow like it has?
Joe Schirmer: Yeah, well, no, it's just so funny what, you know, what draws you into something and then like decades later, it's something really different, and of course when I was in my early twenties, I graduated college, I went and camped out in an avocado grove and worked on a farm in Santa Barbara.
And I didn't have any kids. I didn't have any bills. I was free. I didn't have student debt, you know, I was free to do whatever I want to do. And, it's so different right now. Not just my own kids, but also all the kids of all the employees. I mean, I have two [00:06:00] brothers that have worked for me for 25 years.
Their families, one of the kids is graduating high school or just graduated high school. And I remember when he was born, and it's just crazy, so it's a lot, it's a lot more weight. And it's a lot more, the social aspect of sustainability, you know, like getting into it, there's social, economic and environmental, right?
And I, that was the triangle I studied about sustainability. Right. And I got drawn into the horticulture, you know, so the environment, I'm a natural born environmentalist because I love nature, I grew up surfing and going to the mountains and stuff. So, that's like easy for me to connect with.
Economics, ah, you know, you look the other way, whatever, you deal with that. And then all of a sudden that sneaks right up on you.
James Maiocco: But look at the economic impact you're having. You're also creating jobs, right? And like you said, it is a three legged stool. When I was studying sustainability and in the planning school in the mid nineties, the same thing, that was the same.
Same three legs, economic, environmental, and social, right? And it's fantastic to see you to do it [00:07:00] responsibly and do it so well, right? So, well done, and great to see too that, like you said, to grow from a few acres, what'd you say, four acres to begin with now, going up to 45. Wow, that's a lot of production.
So, now, like you said, you guys previously had a couple markets. You guys also really made a strong name for Dirty Girl in the wholesale markets in San Francisco. I know servicing many of the really high-end restaurants in San Francisco, who obviously love the quality of your produce, right? Just picked off the vine.
The flavor explosion you get in your mouth when you have a perfectly sun ripened tomato . It's awesome. Right? But, tell me a little bit how that's grown for you. What was wholesale looking like for you before COVID? How much of that was of, was your business was driving through wholesale at that time?
Joe Schirmer: Yeah, that's really interesting question. And first of all, the idea of wholesale, when you're a farmer, you tend to get like retail when you can go direct to the customer and then you go wholesale, but there's really layers, [00:08:00] you know, in the wholesale. There's wholesale that my neighbor who's a strawberry farmer he's talking about how many flats a year per acre he gets out and what price he gets and he just goes to the big wholesaler, the coolers and he's just beholden to whatever price the market gives him, right?
And then there's smaller wholesale people that we deal with. There's a bunch of companies that buy and sell. There's a cook's company, for example, that, that really deal with chefs. And so, they appreciate high quality, if you're in the strawberry wholesale market and you're looking at varieties, there's a lot of characteristics.
One of them is shipability, this is a good shipper. I don't care about that. I want a good eater. I want the best tasting thing and that's what we do. So, there's a niche within wholesale that will look at quality and taste and so forth. But many times if you're stuck in that model, you need to get yields, right?
You need cosmetic perfection and yields, right? And that's something that I've really learned to deal with that. A lot of times we do get the [00:09:00] cosmetic perfection, but it's really the branding and the quality, the overall quality and the eatability of our food that is what attracts the people to us that want our stuff.
So, we do some wholesaling, but it's like these people that really want us and know what we do. So it's not necessarily like, we're not racing to the bottom with the big farms when we're doing our wholesale, right? A lot of it, and when we do with restaurants, one of the great things that Barn2Door has allowed us to do is structure the prices through, you know, three tiered prices.
So, what we used to be able to do is we sent out a fax a while ago, we'd have like a fax list.
James Maiocco: You're talking old school. I don't even think some of our listeners know what a fax is.
Joe Schirmer: I know.
James Maiocco: They've probably heard of it, but...
Joe Schirmer: I know.
James Maiocco: Probably have never actually seen one before.
Joe Schirmer: Crazy, and yeah, so you fax out, you get on a fax list and it sends all those fax. I remember the do do do do, the fax would be dialing up and sending these faxes to the fax list, right? And then we got really advanced and we had an email list, right? And then we'd bulk email everybody.
We probably did CC'd in a way where we didn't [00:10:00] hide people or did it wrong, whatever. And then what happened there when you do that and you have this list of people and say you only have 45 pounds of French beans, you know, and you can't tell anybody that you have them because if you get three people and they all want 40 pounds, you've just oversold everything, right?
And so, we never had the ability to mark inventory. And that's the big thing that transitioned for us when we deal about, what I would say restaurants. Wholesale is another level when we're dealing to bigger companies that are reselling versus a restaurant, a lot of the restaurants that we sell to you know, usually big cities through the US have a handful maybe a dozen of these kind of restaurants and in San Francisco East Bay there's dozens of them, and it's a whole food scene where all these young people come to advance their careers, right? And they really want to make an impact and really want to do something there.
And so, they come to us, they look for what we have. And now what we can do is if we have 12 bunches of cilantro, I can put on our live inventory, 12 bunches of cilantro for Tuesday. [00:11:00] And as soon as they're sold, they're sold. Everybody can see that it was there. And when you get on there, it's sold out.
You can see it's sold out, right? So, you got to get on there early. So, that's been a huge change in that because what happened back in the day when we were doing this, you know, we're sending out an email, and then I had someone that I basically paid to have a cell phone in her back pocket 24 hours a day.
She was receiving text messages. She was getting calls. She was getting emails and these are all great. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it, but the idea of, Hey, I saw you at the market and I saw that you had Tokyo turnips and the list didn't have Tokyo turnips. Can you get me the Tokyo turnips?
Okay. And then she's got to call Sergio in the field and say, Hey, do we have any more Tokyo turnips? I didn't put it on the list because I didn't think we have very much, it's like back and forth and backwards, it's like so much work to navigate that, you know? And so, drawing the line saying, Hey, for Tuesday, we have an order cutoff at 10 a. m. on Monday, [00:12:00] right? After that you can't order. It doesn't give you the fulfillment day, right? So, you've got to order before 10 and this is what we have and you can order it and we know what we have.
And of course, sometimes we have to guess because we are picked to order, we don't know everything that we have. And of course, when we have like in strawberry season, we just put like a thousand flats of strawberries on there because we're going to have the strawberries. But a lot of times when we're limited on commodities, which a lot of times we are, it really helps us being able to offer all these restaurants more items, because like we can put everything, there's just one, if there's just a little bit, whatever we can put them on and it really helps them. And it helps me cut off the conversation.
Of course you get someone new and they're used to ordering a certain way. You got to do a lot of handholding with restaurants. And that's one thing that's always been that way. It's always been a little bit extra to deal with restaurants, but I feel like for me, compared to a lot of other farmers I know, [00:13:00] I feel more in line and kind of friendship and bonding over the people that work in kitchens and cities, that just seems like a very familiar demographic to me and a career that's kind of in line with what I'm doing.
Very similar, you know, versus I think, a lot of times when you're very rural and then these buyers are very city, there can be kind of a clash and you get like a prima donna attitude and it can really rub a crusty old farmer the wrong way. You know what I mean? And I'll tell you, we're all crusty at some point and some are super crusty all the time, you know?
So, it can be a really hard fit for people and it can be, especially, you get chefs that are very pushy. They're like, I want this, I want, you know, they really, they're really energetic and how do you defend yourself? You got to put up your guard, you put up your timeline.
Here's your list. You set it and then you bring people in full. New people come, you help them out. And that's what I do a lot now is, I go to the farmer's markets and I see shops and I go, Hey, you know, you can order this online. Here [00:14:00] you go, dude. What's your email? And I sign up the email.
I send him an email. I say, Hey, good to meet you. This is how you do it. I've got a video that shows how to get online and put an order in. And also here's a little link to our store, and I do a lot of handholding and some people just don't even need that, right? Some people just buy things on their phone all the time and they know what to do.
And some people just are so analog, it's hard to pull them over and pull them in. And so we hold their hands, put a little bit extra, you know, we got a lot of chefs. I don't know that our MailChimp, I think it's five or 600 emails.
Something like that.
James Maiocco: Quite a bit, quite a bit. Well, what's great about this though, too, as you said, you know, previously. Most producers like yourself would assemble a fresh sheet, assemble it manually, perhaps it would even PDF it or send out a spreadsheet, might text it, email it, however, and then just like you said, it's kind of death by a thousand paper cuts because orders come in, like you said, text, message, phone, email back.
So, I love this picture of your former employee who [00:15:00] would literally have a cell phone, you know, in her back pocket 24 hours a day. Versus, guess what? Every one of those chefs all know how to make a purchase on Amazon. We all make purchases online. Nine out of 10 adults in America have done it, right?
It's not hard to make a purchase online. It's just getting them to realize like, hey, look. Now your food, instead of getting a fresh sheet that's just a one time PDF, like you said, that's immediately out of date the second you send it out, it can have live access to your inventory, right? Your crew can actually say, here is what's available, and if people purchase out of it, the inventory is updated in real time. There's no confusion, right? There's no arguing over who get those 12 packs of cilantro, just like you said. Let's take a little bit of a step back in history, right? You've done a really fantastic job, I think an enviable job, of building great rapport with chefs who value the quality of your product, right?
These are not chefs who are buying from Sysco. These are chefs who want to buy your products, right? High end, high taste, like you [00:16:00] said. When COVID happened and the wholesale market just shut down, what did you do, Joe? Right? I mean, just all of a sudden you have all this fruit, all this food. It was kind of a fateful day for a lot of farmers.
Joe Schirmer: Yeah, that was, I mean, it was just really, wow, what a time. Well, I'll tell you, and the weirdest thing about it is during COVID in December of 2019, we moved our family to Oaxaca city. My wife wanted to study Spanish. She's a social worker, you know, she wanted to get, a higher level and moved all the kids there in Spanish immersion.
So they're in Spanish school, private school. They're wearing suits, everything. We were there. And my goal for the business, at that time was okay, I'm gonna be six months down here. I'm gonna be away I'm gonna try and get everything online. It's just random that I was doing it, you know, so this is like, that fall we had just gone into Google and gotten the G Suite, so we don't have our personal emails, right? Like we had personal emails going on in our old chef list was a personal email of a former employee, right? Because I didn't, just [00:17:00] didn't really know. So, we started doing that, and I had already, you know, interviewed with Barn2Door to check it out, to see, hey, is this something we want to do?
What are we doing? Because I had always steered away from CSAs. Even though I worked on five of them when I was learning to farm, I managed a CSA, I worked for CSA. I know them very well, but I steered away because I wanted to kind of have what I have and sell what I have, and that was our model and it was good, but I was thinking like, you know, it'd be good to spread the branches of the tree.
So, during COVID we moved down there and when everything went down and what, by April, I think, and there was no COVID down there, which is the thing, but it was shutting down getting so weird that we had to move back. So, we moved back right in the middle of that, but I'd already been doing a little bit of legwork to get online a little more.
Example, we had, like you say, Fresh Sheet, right? We'd got Harvest Sheet. It's one piece of paper. And then in the office, we write down how many we want for this market, right? And then it goes to [00:18:00] Sergio in the field and they go pick it and they write down how much they actually got. Orders come in, text to Sergio.
He writes down on the bottom or on the back. Right? And then circle it when it's done. Well, I don't have the sheet. Where's the sheet? I don't know, you know. It's not a live document that we can share. And then that sheet goes in the truck that goes to the farmer's market. Right? Where's the sheet?
It's in the market if you want to see that info. So, it's just an amazing time during COVID that I was already in the mentality of trying to get a little, because I'm not a tech guy, but I can learn whatever, and so I was already in that process. So, right when we did it, what happened was, by the time I moved back all the restaurants were closed except for a few that had like little takeout windows, right?
So, that was almost entirely gone, and that was probably springtime, strawberries were starting. So, it's probably anywhere 30 percent of our income, maybe, restaurants, and that kind of [00:19:00] ordering maybe 30 to 50, depending on the day. Then that was zero, maybe five, 10%, right?
And what happened was everybody's locked down in their house. And then I had already done all this research with all the online businesses, how I was going to do it. And so, went to Barn2Door and signed up, let's go and went heavy into the onboarding, right. And everybody was locked down.
And so, we instantly turned into a CSA farm and we were building CSA boxes at a massive rate, filling up our cooler, driving trucks, filling them up, going, and at first, we're all doing it analog, right? We're all doing it analog on paper. That's when we first started. And that's why a lot of why I came down.
It's like, I don't like how you guys are doing it. I gotta come home now and came home. I had to fight. I actually lost my main employee of 12 years over this because she has a lot of control over this world and that side of stuff. And I was like, no, we got to do it this way. And I was driving hard to just modernize really.
And [00:20:00] so, we organized that and we went from like, 30 -70 to 100 percent retail, maybe 95 retail, 5 percent little bit of this. There was farmers markets still going on, but they were like cut in half. And it was a huge amount of everybody wanted boxes.
Everybody wanted home delivery or pickup, you know? And so, we were just running trucks and this is not what we did. The field was absolutely incredible. They did a perfect job. And it felt almost knock on wood, like it wasn't a challenge to them. They built these boxes, picked this stuff. They did no problem.
The logistics of going from zero CSA to having like 250 CSA people. Right? Overnight. It was incredible. I mean, that's what you do. The logistics of finding the route to delivery, right? The old days, I used to go to the restaurant delivery in San Francisco, I had a bunch of sheets of paper.
I'd go to one and it would be MapQuest, a printout. And I'd go to the other one and you know, [00:21:00] I mean, it's unbelievable, but we didn't know any, we didn't know any better. We didn't know any better. So, we had to make do. But, the difference now, following your app, Routific, just going ding, ding, ding, ding, connecting the dots, it creates the most efficient route.
It's just amazing. And just servicing all the orders. Organizing what we need to pick, making that, and then fulfilling that. I mean, it's an amazing logistical feat. And, I know people that did large CSAs for years and the way that they were doing it, you just figure out how to do it analog, you know.
James Maiocco: Yeah.
Joe Schirmer: But, I certainly wasn't going to do it. So anyway, when COVID hit, we just went full on retail CSA box. And then, as the restaurant slowly came back in, it was actually like this huge blessing because what we did was we basically kind of changed totally the way we're doing it and then as everybody started coming back I'm like, hey, this is how we're doing it now and I had a you know [00:22:00] video, I think Alessandro was my guy at the time.
He made a video I think we still we might still use that his video. I forget. Onboarding how to place an order with Dirty Girl Produce online, you know real simple and so, as they came in, they're like, Whoa, can I text you? I'm like, this is how we do it now. This helps me huge.
And I'd explain why I'm doing it and how it helps me. And people are like, Oh, let's go. When you tell them why you're changing, I mean, people don't like change. But if you have a good reason to be changing, people are on board, especially my customers, because people that want to support my farm want to support sustainable farming.
They want to support local, they want to support good food, all these good things, you know? So when they see that we're changing and it's helping to support our farm, they're in it, they're totally, on it. But it was a good opportunity because I kind of lost this old way and there was nobody knocking on the door, and then all of a sudden when we were set up and ready, people started coming back, and it was crazy as the restaurant started coming back, then the retail [00:23:00] CSA thing started dropping, and I think everybody hit the market. And it got saturated. And also people wanted to now go to the store and buy food. You know, people were locked in their homes.
James Maiocco: People want to be social too. Like people do want to be social. None of us want to be locked down. I love going to a great restaurant as much as I enjoy cooking at home. Right. My wife is actually a trained chef, right? So I love eating at home. I get a great meal, whether I'm out or at home, but nonetheless, it is wonderful to go out to a fantastic restaurant.
Wow. You know, I didn't know the backstory though, that you had actually lost an employee over this decision, but I have to commend you, Joe. I mean, that must've been hard because, you worked with that person for 12 years, but like you said, you have to modernize, right? It's not like the world is going to just decide not to move ahead with technology, right?
Like this is going to happen. It's just a question, are you going to get on board or are you not? Right? So, what would be your advice? I mean, we talked to other large producers like yourself, who are on the cusp of thinking about making this transition, but they may have one or two [00:24:00] employees on their team.
Maybe it's the head of their pick team or the grow operations, maybe it's the farm box manager, and they have been doing it manually for quite some time. But because of it, they're kind of stuck, right? What would be your advice to the owners of that business? How would you, if you were talking to them right now, what would you say to them, why this change is so necessary for your business in terms of scaling and building something more profitable long term?
Joe Schirmer: Right. Yeah, that's a really good question. And I think, well, the one thing about using in particular the Barn2Door platform is that it's changeable, you know? Every farm that I know is a different small business, other than the large farms, but all the small farms doing kind of what I do.
We all do it kind of the same, but we also do it very, very different. And so, you have to be able to tweak the knobs and customize it and make it work for you, and you need to build efficiency. We have no margins in farming to be inefficient. We can't blow it on an irrigation cycle.[00:25:00]
And let the things get too dry. Or miss a hand weeding, or anything like that. And if we're stuck in the mud, someone's scratching out, stressing, doing extra work because they're trying to do it all by hand on a piece of paper with a pen, it's just extra work. So, it's about bringing in a system that has a higher capacity and then whittling it down to exactly what is serving you.
And what's going to help you, right? Don't do stuff that you don't need. Like in Barn2Door, you know, there's a lot of different things, but I use all the stuff over time we've whittled down, it's like a little river, following the course of what we need and that's how we do it.
I'm sure we do it very similar to like many other people, but I bet we do it a lot different then a lot of other people, as well. Right? So, I think that's just, being a farm, it's not just about using Barn2Door, it's about using everything and making sure you're doing it efficiently and you let go of [00:26:00] whatever's not serving you.
You know, if you have this attachment, oh God, I have to grow zucchini. You go to your therapist and your therapist says, Oh, when you were a little kid, you know, you had a zucchini plant at your grandma's house and you're attached to zucchini. But at the farm, you're not making any money with the zucchini and it's rashing your arms or something.
I don't know what, but like, let it go. If that's not working for you, let it go. And it's the same thing is, find something that helps you be more efficient, and of course in our world we're living in right now, everybody's online. So, a lot of people that I know that like to farm, they want to deal with nature.
They're not necessarily heavily computer literate, you know, I'm not saying farmers are computer illiterate, you're not necessarily programmers, right? So, you have to have some sort of assistance to have your presence online.
So, how are people going to find you, people back in the day, they drive around and they see a farm and there's a roadside stand and that's how they [00:27:00] know there's a roadside stand as they drove by it. But now your roadside stand could be almost completely invisible to passerbys, but they find it on Google or on whatever app they're on, they see it on Instagram or Facebook or wherever, and then there's a pinpoint and it, shows you the directions to go to this amazing on farm roadside stand, right?
Or pickup site, or whatever it is, and so that's just what people need to know, and of course everybody's going to be different. How rural you are, how close you are to the city, all the different communities that Barn2Door is serving, I mean, God, it's like the entire country, right?
It's, we're all so different. And I think, the changing that is going on as people are doing things online. And so, you have to figure out and navigate how you're going to be findable online and how are you going to sell stuff online and how that's going to help you, and that's the thing, is to make it so, like I say, it's serving you and it's helpful.
But yeah, and that's the problem with farming is the way that you learn [00:28:00] your lesson is you lose money, you know?
James Maiocco: Well, let's help some farms avoid some of those mistakes.
Joe Schirmer: And that's what I'm saying is that, you know, my most valuable tool that I have now, I say is my iPhone.
And the most valuable thing that's in it is the directory, all my contacts. All the people that I can call when I don't know what to do. And that's more valuable than anything, than any tractor, any tractor, truck, anything I have, any tool, you know, I can replace. But having these relationships built is so important.
And that includes, our online presence, Barn2Door, MailChimp. We use QuickBooks, all these different relationships I have and all the farmers that I can call up and say, Hey, what do I do? I've got too much fricking lettuce, like these are very, very valuable things. And I find that if I can call up my friend, and he tells me what to do, that just saved me money because I would have done this.
Because I didn't know what to do, right? And so that's, I think what we get with Barn2Door is we [00:29:00] get assistance in this regard and sales and promotion and PR and give us the tools.
James Maiocco: Well, we really appreciate the opportunity to work with you guys. You guys have built a fantastic, iconic brand there in the Bay Area.
Joe, talk a little bit about the changing nature or the changing of the guard perhaps in the restaurant industry a little bit, right? All these young chefs now, probably 25 to 39 years old, like you said, they all got an iPhone or an Android in their back pocket, right?
And so, this idea that they can simply access and order from your farm at the end of service at 1 or 2 a. m. in the morning, right? And just know that you can wake up the next day and just shows up, right? Just making it simple for them. But a lot of that really starts with, obviously, managing your inventory.
You discuss this idea of having different price sheets, et cetera. Talk to me a little bit about like setting different expectations for retail buyers versus wholesale buyers for fulfillment, right? Because obviously your chefs, I would expect, want to have really [00:30:00] specific order cutoffs and delivery dates and times, but you can't afford to drive to every single home in the Bay Area, right?
Like, so how do you balance the expectation, what you're doing for wholesale buyers versus perhaps what you're doing for retail?
Joe Schirmer: Right. Okay. Yeah, that's a good question. And an interesting thing about retail and wholesale is how we use it, we use the two tiered system. We have our retail shop, which is basically our CSA.
People can buy a farm box, salad box, a half farm box, they can subscribe, they can buy one, they can add, when we have strawberries, you can buy a half flat or whole flat, same with tomatoes, you know, we'll do like an onion pack, different kinds of beans, jars, that sort of thing on the retail. But, it's like one price for everything, right?
And when we get on a wholesale, the fun thing about it is that it's three tiered pricing. So, the first price that's in there is retail. So this is the wholesale price, and it's what I call table price. You know, it's what we sell on the farmer's market. $3 [00:31:00] bunches.
Bunches, all our bunches right now are $3, right? If you buy 12 bunches, they're $2.50. If you buy 36 or 48, depending on what it is, they going down to $2. So, that ends up being our wholesale. Like what most people would call wholesale, our price is a bit tiered on the bulk purchase, right? So, a lot of restaurants that buy from us, a lot of the orders that come in are mixed between a full retail price they're getting on one item and then a price break, a wholesale price they're getting on something that they're getting a large quantity of, right?
Versus like what we used to do. Someone would come and I'd go full retail and go restaurant, 20%, right? And it didn't matter what quantities of what they bought, I'd do something like that, which doesn't make as much sense, but it's a way to do it. You got to set a standard.
You got to set a rule. And what this allows us to do as well is that when I only have a little bit of it, it's only in the retail. So if you want it, you're paying full price. You're [00:32:00] not going to buy the only 10 pounds of French beans at the price when we're swimming in French beans and a discount of like 40 pounds of it, right?
So, it allows us within the wholesale setup. And of course, I've got cooks, I've got a couple other like actual wholesale people that are buying from us and reselling and they're going online and they're buying wholesale. It's a wholesale purchase, right? Except sometimes when we don't have a lot, they're buying that as well, and they're buying it retail, because the thing is with wholesale, if you're doing real wholesalers, people that are buying and selling, they want to buy low, sell high, right?
This allows me to go, Boom. Here's my price. And it's not negotiable. You want to negotiate, you yell at your laptop. Okay.
James Maiocco: Exactly.
Joe Schirmer: I don't know.
James Maiocco: You're not on the phone with anybody. There's no text messaging back and forth.
I don't call anyone in Amazon to negotiate the price. Right?
Joe Schirmer: Right. Right. Because people will try to whittle you down and it's always at a time when like, God, I've got a lot of stuff. I have to sell it. And people know that in farming, there's [00:33:00] desperation and people take advantage of that. That's a lot of the produce market in San Francisco, like the wholesale corridor and it's sharky and I'm not good at it.
It rubs me the wrong way. I don't like to play that game. Some people like that game and they get comfortable and of course you build relationships in that, but that's how we do with our wholesaling is we're able to not just put inventory, but based on inventory and whatever we can get, we can set.
And we can turn off the bulk prices, at whatever level we want, which really helps us because a lot of times, God, I only have a little bit of this. I want full retail, you know? And so that's what I do. I put it out full retail. I know I'm going to sell it full retail. Maybe some people like, ah, well, I want to get some, what's up, what's this price, and I'm like, well, we only have a little bit.
So whoever wants it gets it, you know? And, it's a trip with the changing of the demographic of people. I think more and more farms are doing this. I mean, there's still a lot of farms I see in the farmer's market, for example, that don't take credit cards.
And they are [00:34:00] just taking cash and, I get it. I get it. But it's also like, I always felt when I didn't do it, and I saw the first couple of people that had credit card machines, you know, bulky, weird thing...
James Maiocco: Sort of like the laundromat ones.
Joe Schirmer: And I think we get more sales with that, and then I think you're missing out.
Hey, you know, we got one and I think you're missing out on sales because when people pull out money and you spend it at the farmer's market and they spend all their money and then they go home. Unless they can use their credit card and then they're going to keep buying and then they're going to buy from you.
James Maiocco: Well, my question is who carries cash anymore? Like when I look at the data, it tells me 98 percent of people prefer credit card. I don't even use a credit card. I just use Apple Pay, right? Like I just even just tap my phone, right? So this idea, like I think I have some emergency cash I keep in my bag just in case I get stuck or my phone's dead or someone steals it, whatever, but yeah, cash seems to just be going [00:35:00] by the wayside, right? So, now some farmers get really frustrated with fees. So, what are your thoughts around that, right? We often find Farmer's first number, just assume everything should be priced, assuming people are paying by credit card. So, just factor the three percent in, but then secondly, definitely offer the ability for your buyers to pay for the fees.
Offer them the ability to pay for a tip or to cover the credit card fees at checkout.
Joe Schirmer: Yep. Well, that's one great thing too. Yeah. Having that, and you can do that point of sale as well is to put in a tip option to help offset. Now, of course, a tip is traditionally supposed to go to front of the house or whatever.
That's a big issue in San Francisco who gets tipped, you know? But, in the checkout online, people tip and a lot of times they tip and, you can kind of look at it like, Oh, it's 2.7%, but if you incorporate tips, then all of a sudden it's 1. 2 or 1. 5 or something, it ends up taking away considerable amount of that.
And also, recently [00:36:00] I've noticed, I think it's painful when people make the transition, but once you're into a credit card economy, then you're over it because it is a service that you're paying for, you know? And for example, I get a box of quarters, it's $500, it weighs like, I don't know, 30 pounds, almost super heavy.
I made my 10 year old daughter carry it out, here, hold this out of the bank the other day and that costs 25 bucks to get that. You know what I mean? So, it's not free. Cash isn't free. And then, another thing you gotta do, well, then you have cash laying around. How's the liability on cash treating you?
Do you wanna have a bunch of cash laying around your house? Or the transition between a farmer's market to the farm, to wherever you're going, and the bank opens on Monday at 9? I mean, there is a liability with cash that's real.
James Maiocco: And you want to trust your employees too, but we know people's hands also dip into the till, right?
That's a very real thing, right? And so, it doesn't take long for some of those transactions [00:37:00] to just, again, erode any quote unquote perceived savings of just accepting cash, right?
Joe Schirmer: And the other thing about when you're using cash, well, good luck with your inventory. You know what I mean? Good luck inventory on all your cells, right?
So, unless you're using a POS, and cash, which is very rare for a farmer at a farmer's market.
James Maiocco: The Barn2Door POS supports cash and POS.
Joe Schirmer: Absolutely. So people do that, but the reality of the situation, I think most people do the cash, you know, whatever, it's just gone. When you use a credit card, you're recording your sales.
When you're going online, you know what you sold. So, you have so much more data to draw from to learn what the sales patterns are, and how you can do it better because every year we got to get better at what we're doing. We got to change a little bit to be better. And having data is huge.
It's huge. And if you're doing it all [00:38:00] analog. And you're all kind of guessing, and with cash is something that often, it continues that cycle, right? So, what is more profitable? Dandelion greens, or kale? Well, how do you know? You've got to figure out how much you're selling of each and how much it costs to grow each.
And having the most data that you can is important. And I think on the sales aspect, when you're using a credit card, when you're using an app, when you're using a Barn2Door platform, then you have all this data and it's really important. It's really, really important. So I always kind of extrapolate, okay, well, let's say I got this much in credit card this much in cash.
I'm just going to assume these cash buyers are purchasing the same as the credit card buyers. It might not be, but you know, I'm going to extrapolate that out in that way. But, the only reason I get to do that and look at the whole picture is because I have the section over here with people buying credit cards or Apple Pay, or, you know, Apple Watches.
James Maiocco: Yeah, I do use my Apple Watch too. I know it sounds [00:39:00] finicky, but it is a lot easier when you're out walking to not carry a phone and just have your Apple Watch with Apple Pay on it. Makes it easy. Well, hey, before we sign off, I wanted to go back and revisit one topic you mentioned, which was dealing with routing, right?
Because I know this is a hot topic, particularly like for folks who are in cities like San Francisco or Dallas or D. C. or Chicago, where you've got just a lot of traffic, beltways. San Francisco, you've got the constraint of water and bridges as well. I mean, there's just a lot of challenges with traffic and making those deliveries.
Can you share a little bit about like that experience that you have today between getting all these online orders with Barn2Door and then we have your pack list and push that through to Routific for your deliveries? Can you help explain for somebody what that experience looks like from a grower's perspective?
Joe Schirmer: Yeah, I mean, Man, I can't believe how we used to do it. But then also we used to, I think, simplify our deliveries. A lot of times I think what we would do is we're not going to [00:40:00] delivery to you in San Francisco unless you buy X dollars, right? But what really helped us out is once we built our CSA, which is small, but we have our pickup sites.
And we have enough retail pickup site customers coming to these sites to allow for a route that goes year round, right? So, that allows for us to do way more deliveries. It used to be like, we gotta get an X amount of dollars to make it worth doing a route to San Francisco. And in the winter, everything dies down.
A lot of times we would just stop doing deliveries for the winter. And now we're going year round and we're going strong year round. And we have the ability to tell people, Hey, Thursday is in San Francisco in the East Bay, we're in a truck, we're going, if you need, you know, six bunches of something, let me know.
The small order doesn't matter because they're going to get a delivery fee. And what happens with the delivery fee is it encourages them to place an order, right? [00:41:00] Or they just eat the delivery fee and that helped offset the time that we spent going to them, right? But I think the efficiency of being able, I would say to make the route, but don't not have to make the route. I used to have to make the route, right? And it would be like a map, you know, master map. And I would draw lines from one point, and I have to find all these spots and you end up going back and forth through San Francisco.
James Maiocco: And look up the addresses.
Joe Schirmer: It's just unbelievable. And now this is just like, this is all data. That just gets exported and the pack list goes straight to Routific. It has all the stops. It has what they're getting and you print out all your receipts and then it just flip and it, there's your route and then you text it to your driver and the driver and you go start, and it just goes navigate to the first one.
You go to the first one and this is what they're getting, check, got it, [00:42:00] do it, go to the next one, and it's showing you, without even having to think, the most efficient way to navigate from place to place to place. I mean, without doing that, it's just unbelievable how terrible it used to be.
James Maiocco: Isn't it funny? Rewinding and thinking about how you used to do it, because now it becomes second nature, but for farmers who are listening to this, it's the time savings on this one alone is just worth its weight in gold, right? Just this idea that you can automate a pack list that, maybe you've got five drivers.
I know some of our larger CSAs do like a thousand deliveries and they have seven drivers. Maybe you've got a couple hundred and you got two or three drivers, but you can just push the pack list with the route to the individual driver, boom, it's on their phone and they can go run the deliveries. No work.
It's pretty cool.
Joe Schirmer: What I love about it too is when you're first getting onboarding, figuring it all out. You're like, oh, it's a lot of new stuff. And then as soon as you figure it out, like I figured it out and then I like, oh, this is a [00:43:00] task that happens every time this week at this time, and I can just hand this off to someone else.
And they just do it and it's very routine. It just gets really into a routine versus moving into something that gets really chaotic. And you have to make a whole bunch of judgments like, God, is this worth it? Oh, should I go there? Is that too far away? You know what I mean? Because that's what I used to always be battling.
And that was a stressful part of it. It's like trying to figure out how we're going to do it and who I need to call to get in. Now it's like, this is what we do. I tell everybody we get all the orders in, there's a certain amount of inventory and it all works out, and someone else does it.
I hand this task off to someone that works in the office that does this stuff. And I'll know how to do it, but I don't also have to do it, because it is so routine. And I think once you transfer over, that you don't have to do this huge amount of creative work, like mental games to create an analog [00:44:00] route.
I mean, I think it's simple, it's simpler for some people that if you have a few commodities or one commodity and you're bringing it all in to one place, a wholesale, so that's one thing, this is where you're going, some people, old school, they don't even use navigation for that one spot.
But as you get another one and another, another, another, eventually it gets so complicated that it creates a lot of stress. And then you use routing software and it's like, bam, it's just done, you know? And it's not something that I have to put a lot of mental energy into thinking about. Which is really huge.
Yeah. Because it can be draining. It can be draining when you have a lot of little decisions eating at you, every day. You're already going to get that as a farmer, right? You're already going to have to make all these judgment calls constantly. So, having the routing just be something that's just a routine is just huge. And, our route right now, our delivery route, is so much better. Like, we can better serve people, [00:45:00] all of our restaurants. And of course, our CSA, but they work together. It's the same truck that goes and does everything, on a Thursday to San Francisco and Tuesday in Santa Cruz.
So, it's really been huge and just very organized, and like I said, routine, once you can get something dialed enough that you can hand it off to someone, cause it's very clearly defined, then that's great. That's a win on my, in my books. I have to do whatever I can't get someone else to do.
And this is something that I can easily train someone to do, you know, and it's a big task.
James Maiocco: That's a big task, yeah. Handling and moving all the product that people are paying for, obviously a very important task. Well, hey, before we sign off Joe, because I know you're a busy guy, any last recommendations or feedbacks for other farmers who, similar to you, may have a robust wholesale business and think about building their business with Barn2Door?
Any feedback for them as a considerer, might listen to this podcast. What would you suggest to them and as they do their research?
Joe Schirmer: What I always say, whenever I talk to anybody, is do as [00:46:00] much research as you can and talk to people that use products.
Like I say, my farmer friends are my biggest resource. Talk to people and see what they do before, so you don't have to reinvent the wheel, which is going to cost you money. So, just familiarize yourself with it, figure out how you're going to do it. Come up with a business, write down a business plan.
That's what I noticed, a lot of real small farms don't do. They don't write down a business plan, which if you're opening a coffee shop and you're going for a loan, you write your business plan, right? A lot of farmers get away with that for some reason, write down your business plan, plan it out all the way.
And that includes everything that you're going to do online, including your website, a web store, credit cards, how you're going to bank, your loan, your credit, all the supplies you're going to buy and all your demographic of everybody you're going to sell to.
Think it all out as much as you can, and then try stuff.
And get paid. Get paid for the hard work you do. I mean, that's a lot of people [00:47:00] have big hearts and they get into farming cause they're trying to make a change or do whatever, but you've got to get paid and you've got to be hard, you know?
And for some people that is not easy. You set your price high and ask for money and be prepared to set your prices higher than you think they should be, that you feel comfortable. And if you have to come down, come down. But set your prices and get people to pay on checkout, and have that money up front.
Don't wait 30 days, 60 days, 90 days to get paid. Get paid now. Everybody else getting paid now. Get paid. So yeah, that's what I think.
James Maiocco: Great feedback. Well, hey, I want to extend my thanks to Joe for joining us on this week's podcast episode. You can check out more of Joe and his farm on their Instagram @DirtyGirlProduce or on Facebook as well.
Here at Barn2Door, we are humbled to support thousands of independent farmers [00:48:00] across the country and delighted to offer services and tools to help farmers access more customers, increase sales, and save time managing their business. If you're an independent farmer who's just getting started or transitioning to selling direct, or if you've been at it a while, just simply want to simplify your business management, please visit Barn2Door.com/learn-more. Thank you for tuning in for today's podcast. We look forward to joining you next time on the Independent Farmer Podcast.
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