Dealing with Challenges
As life shows, change is the only constant. This is particularly true when it comes to market operations. As a market operator, everyday provides risks to your venture in the form of unexpected challenges, as well as opportunities.
The following stories explore the different kinds of operational challenges that market teams can encounter — and the innovative solutions used to solve them.
As you’ll read, despite causing some stress and inconvenience for the teams, these experiences often illuminate the comradery and commitment of the people who run the market. They also offer up important tests of a market operational plan that can serve to future-proof the running of the market. We’ll delve into creating an operational plan in our final lesson, but for now we invite you to read through these stories and consider the kinds of challenges and opportunities your market operation has and perhaps continues to face.
COVID Cautiousness
Enroute to our second market of the day during the peak of COVID cautiousness, we learned that 2 members of our team of 4 had been exposed to COVID while operating the market the day prior. This put us in a difficult position as we relied upon our full team for this market, which was anticipated to be quite busy.
With only 20 minutes to plan and a line of customers already waiting, we shifted our operations to a core team of 2 for the day. Our exposed team members, conscious of customer and team safety, put their creative hats on and devised a social distancing method that still enabled them to play a supporting role at the market. Steering clear of customers, food, and staff, the exposed team members helped communicate with customers from afar, letting them know what was happening, explaining why the line might be longer than usual, and keeping the customers entertained. Meanwhile, the operational staff of two furiously hustled to restock and serve customers.
It was a hot day and an extremely busy market, but our customers were very grateful for how we handled the situation, adjusting our practices to keep them safe while still meeting their needs. Even though they had to wait much longer in line than usual, they left happy.
We recognize that staffing our market will likely always be an operational challenge, but in this instance, what began as a problem ultimately became a team-building experience that demonstrated our commitment to each other and our customers, and to work as a team to make any situation work when we’re on the road together.
A Creative Response
Sometimes, it’s an unexpected problem that reveals your team’s creativity and adaptability. Such was the case one summer morning when, before leaving our headquarters for the day, we encountered such a problem. After checking our truck during our pre-trip procedure, we quickly realized that the awning door would not open. Despite our best efforts, we recognized that we could not fix the issue, and that the door would remain unusable. This presented an alarming situation for the team because without a functioning door, we could not access our display.
When the reality of the situation set in, the team’s creative juices began to flow. Instead of declaring defeat, the team decided to take the truck, but adjust their operations to respond to the constraint. They did so by adopting a traditional farmers market setup, complete with tent and table. The team quickly loaded the truck with tents and tables and arrived at the market early in order to complete the setup before our customers arrived.
While restocking throughout the day was markedly more difficult, our customers barely noticed the change. In fact, the alternate setup resulted in some new interest and delight as customers commented on our creativity once they heard mention of that morning’s challenge.
Supply & Demand
At the beginning of the market season, we re-envisioned our market strategy and had decided to schedule two markets in a day, instead of one. For the second market of the day, scheduled for the afternoon, we set our sights on a new market location for which we had little information on the expected volume of traffic we might see. The team didn’t have high expectations on the sales we might achieve in the new location and we determined that we would have plenty of food to make it through the day with one busy morning market and one slow afternoon market.
About four to six weeks in, we realized we were wrong. Our afternoon market location was consistently showing to be very busy and a huge success. We had miscalculated the volume of traffic we would see in this location and, as a result, we found ourselves unable to stock enough food in the truck and the van to make it through the day. As we also didn’t have time to go back to headquarters to restock, we realized we had created an operational problem for ourselves.
Putting our heads together, we assessed our current delivery schedule for our other trucks (we were part of a food bank) and we quickly realized that if we pre-packed a pallet in the morning, that driver could put a pallet on his truck and meet us halfway on his regular route. This workaround was just what we needed to help us stay on schedule and have full shelves for all of our customers, without putting limits on what they could buy.
An Opportunity to Educate
We take great pride in the fact that much of our produce sold on our mobile market is sourced directly from our own farm. This approach connects us to the land and enables us to deliver the freshed possible produce to our customers with a clear understanding of where the food was grown, how it was grown, and when it was grown. Despite the many benefits of the direct from the farm model, anyone who has operated in this way understands the challenges that can result from unpredictable crop outcomes that may mean you don’t always have the items that your customers want.
While this can be a difficult challenge to navigate sometimes, it helps us to recognize this as an opportunity to talk to our customers about where our food comes from, and why certain items are not available to us that week. To help our customers move beyond their usual shopping list, we strive to make this conversation interactive. Whichever product is plentiful for that week, we build our food demonstrations around so that our customers can sample the food and, in many cases, discover new flavors, textures, and culinary options. So, even though they came to market for tomatoes, they might walk away with bok choy and perhaps some new dishes they can offer their families!