By Mary Elizabeth Kidd
On Wednesday, April 26, just over a month after the pandemic took full effect in Georgia, Georgia Organics launched a weekly market with online ordering from small, local farms and COVID-safe, touchless pick-up at Wrecking Bar Brewpub in Inman Park.
When the Georgia Organics Mid-Week Pop-Up Market ended for the season on Wednesday, Dec. 2, the overall performance was assembled alongside best practices and learnings and shared via a Good Food for Thought webinar with a community of interested attendees from Georgia to Massachusetts, Florida, Washington, Alabama, Minnesota, and beyond. Georgia Organics believes this is a market model that individuals and cooperatives in Georgia and beyond can replicate to foster farmer prosperity in their respective communities.
Over its 32-week run, the Georgia Organics Mid-Week Pop-Up Market served an average of 45 customers per week and helped eight small farms secure over $55,000 in sales to help re-establish some of the pre-pandemic business lost over the tumultuous year of restaurant closures, changes in wholesale channels, and other sales interruptions.
To develop the concept and detailed logistics, members of the Farmer Services, Farm to Restaurant, and Events teams combined their personal experiences farming as well as participating in and coordinating farmers markets to develop an experience that would meet the safety needs of customers and the sales needs of farmers. The goal of this pop-up market was to serve the needs of customers looking for a Covid-safe, farmer-supporting shopping option and, primarily, to enact Georgia Organics’ goal of fostering farmer prosperity.
The Mid-Week Pop-Up Market ended after a successful 32-week run on Wednesday, Dec. 2 and, per our recent Good Food for Thought webinar, has proven to be a highly replicable model for communities looking for alternative, manageable ways to offer a safe, smaller market experience.
While the market ended for the season on Wednesday, Dec. 2, Georgia Organics is passing the proverbial baton to a cooperative of small farmers and hope to continue sharing learnings and advice from this model so that communities in Georgia and beyond can establish their own pop-up markets.
On Dec. 9, Georgia Organics hosted a Good Food for Thought webinar for those interested in beginning an online-driven, safe pickup pop-up market. The Zoom call was led by Kayla Williams, Farmer Services Coordinator with Georgia Organics, who primarily managed the Mid-Week Pop-Up Market, and Lauren Cox, Organic Procurement Coordinator and manager of our Farm to Restaurant program, along with Mid-Week Pop-Up participating farmer Rahul Anand, owner of Snapfinger Farm in Stockbridge.
All participating farmers in the Mid-Week Pop-Up Market were a part of the Farm to Restaurant program’s Farmer Cohort, a group selected for restaurant-specific direct support, training, farmer-chef partner building, and other resources to help foster a more transparent and flourishing “farm to table” economy in Georgia. To learn more about the Farm to Restaurant program, visit farmtorestaurant.georgiaorganics.org/.
In the Good Food for Thought program, Lauren and Kayla shared some of the essential learnings and findings from this 32-week initiative, including the basics of why and how Georgia Organics launched the pop-up market and how others can recreate this online, touchless weekly event.
A few of the foundational factors making this a successful market included strong pre-existing relationships with the team at our host site, Wrecking Bar Brewpub, a Farm to Restaurant Farmer Champion restaurant with an idea event space tied to the restaurant and parking spots for farm-to-trunk curbside pickup. Additionally, the labor of these weekly markets was no small feat, Kayla shared, taking around 8-12 hours of weekly coordination and on-site labor to pack and distribute orders.
Finally, it was important to have the Georgia Organics-hosted Mid-Week Pop-Up website (bit.ly/midweekpopup), designed via Squarespace, where customers could be directed to the online stores of participating farmers. Ongoing marketing via an email newsletter and social media promotion served as reminders for the ordering window and pick-up days and also introduced prospective customers to the participating farmers.
Participating farms in the Mid-Week Pop-Up Market 2020.
For the farmers, a few key operational factors made this market successful: Mid-week scheduling aligned with farmers pre-existing commutes into Atlanta to drop orders at restaurants and, crucially, the online functionality that was possible as most participating farmers had already transitioned to online stores within their weekly sales flow.
The fact that this market served only online pre-orders was a significant differentiator of this pop-up market vs. traditional farmers markets and in-person or on-farm sales.
Atlanta Harvest CSA order at the Mid-Week Pop-Up Market.
A few measurable results of the online, touchless market: foot traffic was lower, the average customer was older, and the spend-per-customer was higher on average, around $35.
Additional logistics details and results were shared in the Mid-Week Pop-Up Market: Best Practices and Reflections webinar, watch below.
Rahul Anand of Snapfinger Farm
When asked about the impact of the Mid-Week Pop-Up Market, Snapfinger Farm’s Rahul Anand responded that the Mid-Week Pop-Up Market, over the 32 weeks running, accounted for 3-4% of Snapfinger’s total sales. “While that number might seem small. It’s big. When you take what that means week-to-week over 30 weeks with payroll going out; it’s really not an insignificant amount of money. It made the logistical burden of changing up where we’re selling things a whole lot easier,” Rahul added.
Farmer EliYahu Ysrael of Atlanta Harvest, another Mid-Week Pop-Up participating farmer, added: “This program has been absolutely amazing. A great way to bring different organizations together that commit to creating a better environment for food. Allowed farmers to have direct access to customers and share resources so that the growers can spend the much needed time in the field and know that food being grown is going to homes in our city.”
Stay tuned to Georgia Organics’ social media for updates about the Mid-Week Pop-Up continuing in 2021!
To watch this Good Food for Thought webinar in full or view the slides from the presentation, click below. Click here to download the full presentation deck.
To learn more about the Farm to Restaurant program, visit farmtorestaurant.georgiaorganics.org/.
If you have questions about how to start an online-driven pop-up farmers market in your community, send an email to info.georgiaorganics [at] gmail [dot] com.