Join the CCOF Foundation for a webinar that highlights the innovative ways farms and local food businesses, like restaurants, bakeries, and candy makers, have joined forces to support each other and pivot marketing in light of COVID-19 restrictions.
Unprecedented times call for creative measures. Gain tips from two farms that have partnered with food businesses to expand their marketing and support their community during the pandemic.
In the first half of the webinar, hear about Soil Born Farms’ drive-through farm stand. Started after COVID-19 stay-at-home orders went into effect, the once-per-week, drive-through market features Soil Born Farms’ produce and prepared products, as well as offerings from various local restaurants and bakeries including chicken pot pies, fresh baked bread, croissants, and pizza dough. The market also offers pantry goods and gardening supplies from local businesses, such as coffee, dipping sauces, and potting soil. Learn first-hand from Soil Born Farms’ founder and co-director Janet Zeller about how the drive-through farm stand got started, as well as the logistics of running the farm stand. Discover how the farm takes orders from customers, collaborates with their food business partners, and coordinates order pick-ups on market day.
In the second half of the webinar, we’ll focus on smaller scale farm/food business collaborations. Jamie Collins from Serendipity Farms will share how she has collaborated with local food businesses, including working with a local candy maker, providing marketing consultation to a restaurant-owner friend when restaurants got shut down at the beginning of shelter in place orders, and diversifying her farm stand with other businesses’ products.
Time will be reserved for questions from the audience.
About Our Speakers
Janet Zeller is a founder and co-director of Soil Born Farms, a non-profit farm and education center located along the American River near Sacramento, California. Zeller has been an activist and educator promoting local family farms, sustainable agriculture, organic food, healthy living, and socially conscious business practices for over 30 years. Zeller was the director of operations for the Good Earth, opening and managing restaurants in Northern California and Oregon. She was the marketing manager for the Sacramento Natural Foods Co-op for 22 years. Zeller is committed to connecting the people who grow food with the people who eat it and creating a local food system where everyone has access to fresh, healthy, organically grown food.
Jamie Collins, owner of Serendipity Farms near Monterey, California, has farmed organically for two decades. She sells produce via farmers’ markets, CSA, and other direct-to-consumer outlets. Collins draws on her experience with interior design to inform the marketing of her farm.
About this Series
This webinar is part of the CCOF Foundation’s Farmers’ Marketing: Tools for Success series, providing tips and tools for farmers to strengthen their sales and income at farmers’ markets and other direct to consumer outlets.
Funding for the series was made possible by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Agricultural Marketing Service through grant AM180100XXXXG055.