5.1 Demand
Procurement is challenging. How do you know you’ve ordered enough? How many times should you order each week? Who should you buy from: local farmers, wholesalers, both? Getting it right is a balancing act that will take some time to achieve. But, it is achievable and becoming skilled at procuring goods for your mobile market begins with first understanding your customers.
Your customers are the heart and soul of your mobile market. They are the reason your market exists, so it is common sense (and good business sense) that you take time to learn more about them and incorporate your learnings into your approach to procurement.
If you have come from an existing non-profit, such as a food bank or a food pantry, you’re probably thinking that you already know a lot about who your mobile market customers will be. This may be true to a certain extent, but do you really know your customers as consumers? Do you know their favorite foods? Do you know what staples they rely on in their diets? Do you know how frequently they shop for produce? Do you know which foods are meaningful to them?
Adopting a different lens - a customer-centric lens - will allow you to answer these kinds of questions and understand your customers more deeply. It will also enable you to gain access to data that is crucial for the sustainability of your mobile market enterprise.
Collecting data on the purchasing behaviors of your customer will help you get a foothold on the quantities of goods to purchase and the frequency with which you need to make your purchases. You can do this simply by:
- Keeping track of the number of customers visiting your market each day
- Noting the times when customer visits are high and low
- Noting changes in customer purchasing habits on a daily, weekly, and seasonal basis
- Keeping track of which goods sell quickly and which ones sit a long time
THE MAGIC NUMBER OF 50!
To create a viable business, you’ll need a consistent minimum of 50 customers per market stop. If you’re struggling to hit this number after community engagement and marketing efforts, you should find another food access solution for this area and look for another area to park.
In addition to observing and noting purchasing behaviors, you can dive deeper to gather more information about your customer’s needs and wants. Being curious and finding out more about them will help you make good choices, and it will build your relationship with your customers. Consider ask your customers:
- What will they be making with their purchase? Are you able to provide all the ingredients?
- What is your market missing that they’d love to see?
- What are their cultural favorites?
- What special meals are they making for a celebration or holiday?
- Why did they choose to shop at your mobile market?
- How do they prefer to pay?
These are just some of the questions you can pose to learn more about your customers, but make sure you take note of the responses to these questions. It’s easy for the details of a casual conversation with a customer to be lost.
Additionally, consider a more formal survey with your community, perhaps on an annual basis, to learn more information about your customers’ demographics, their habits, and their preferences, etc… You will want to ensure you have collected customer contact details, and noted their communication preferences, in order to distribute a survey in an efficient way. Surveying your customers can be an important step in building and maintaining trust with your community and for ensuring your market keeps up-to-date on the social needs you are aiming to address.
Tales from the Road
Some of our favorite market customers included a growing number of Spanish speakers, the majority of whom were ladies. As we were fortunate to have a native Spanish speaker on staff, we were quickly able to identify a customer need that we had missed. We learned that a good number of these ladies wanted to make tamales, a traditional Mesoamerican dish. In order to make this dish they needed corn husks — a product we didn’t carry and had not considered until this need arose. So, we visited the farmer we sourced our corn from who agreed to provide us with 12 dozen corn husks in order to test the product out with our customers.
We quickly learned that our corn husks were not the corn husks the ladies desired, and so we sought to understand what was needed and tried again. Through trial and error and open conversation with our customers, we learned what they were looking for and we established ourselves as a market that cared. We eventually came to understand the ladies’ requirements and secured a regular supply of the husks. Week-after-week the demand grew as word spread about a source for great, fresh corn husks. This was a great win not only for our market, but the farmer and community alike.
When speaking with your customers about their purchasing and meal decisions, use these opportunities to suggest some great pairing options, which will also help you move more goods. In addition to what they can take advantage of right now, let your customers know what new goods or promotions might be available next time they visit.
Providing your customers with some “insider knowledge” of what’s coming, will give them a reason to return (we’ll cover this in more detail in “Merchandising”). View each conversation as an opportunity to learn something about your customers and as an opportunity for them to learn something about your market’s offerings — and about your produce.
Showcasing a vegetable with creative recipes, healthy facts, storage information, and fun tidbits, can help sway your customers into a new way of looking at your products and can spark some interesting conversations.
Gaining an understanding of your customers preferences and behaviors is important, but it is equally important that your mobile market provides a consistent set of offerings. Your customers will be delighted by specialty or seasonal items appearing at your market, but remember that there will be a core set of items that they will always want to keep stocked in their homes. You should ensure that your market can facilitate this, but you’ll need to know what goods to offer.
Tales from the Road
Our market has a focus on local produce in the growing season, which in Pennsylvania means no bananas — and our customers want bananas!
This problem becomes a marketing task for us, where we focus our messaging on the pros of local food and highlight the other seasonal options available to meet the needs of our customers. Emphasis is placed on our eggs and dried goods, such as rice and beans that allow for a whole meal (proteins, carbs, and fat) to be purchased from our market. Additionally, we highlight our pantry essentials like olive oil, vinegar, honey to make accompanying dressings or sauces.
In the winter months when local supply is more limited, we switch our market model and source our produce from wholesalers. This results in an abundance of South American produce and fruits, which customers appreciate.
Our switch from the winter to the growing season can disrupt our customers’ buying habits, so it must be communicated to and we gently reset our customer’s expectations regarding the change in our offerings. This is a marketing cycle we comfortably move through each year with our market.
Your local grocery store is a great data source for examining the core produce that your customers currently rely on and how much they will spend on an item. This research is easy to do. Take a look at your local grocer’s weekly flier and note the core offerings. Venture into the store and ask the grocer which items they always stock. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. You wouldn’t want to visit the grocery store to find that your basic items aren’t in stock. The same thinking applies to your market. Your customers will need to know that it’s worth the trip. Learning about their needs, wants, and behaviors will help you make smart procurement decisions that will make a trip to your market a delight.
Activity: What product categories will you be carrying to meet the demands of your customers (fruits, veggies, eggs, dairy, etc.) Now identify 2 sources within 50 miles of your home base that may be able to supply your market with each product category. – This could be a small scale farmer, grocery store, food auction, wholesaler, etc.
Note: The Specialty Crops Market News from the USDA (https://www.marketnews.usda.gov/mnp/fv-home) is a great resource to use for gathering information about the supply, demand, and pricing of over 400 fresh fruit, vegetable, nut, ornamental, and other specialty crops.