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• If you sell salad items, consider
offering edible flowers. You may
not sell a lot, but it will add colour
to your display and it will be
unique.
• If you sell baked goods, make all
the popular products as well as
some that are unique and have
great flavour, such as a strawberry-
raspberry pie, a rhubarb-raspberry
pie or a three-berry pie.
Offer selection
. If you sell carrots,
offer several types and varieties such
as baby carrots, Nantes, cylindrical
types and a few novelty coloured
(purple, white) carrots to get the
consumer’s attention. If you plan to
market peas, have regular garden
peas, but also offer some sugar
snap peas and snow peas. If you sell
sweet corn, offer yellow, bicolour and
white varieties. Or offer both sugar
enhanced (SE) and supersweet (sh2)
varieties and let customers mix and
match. They will think you must be the
most knowledgeable corn grower to
have all that variety. If you talk to them
about the quality differences between
varieties, they get to appreciate that
all sweet corn isn’t “peaches and
cream” and that you taught them the
differences.
Offer samples
. There isn’t a better
way to increase sales than offering
samples; consumers are reluctant to
buy something if they don’t know what
it tastes like. It also draws attention
to your displays if you have people
coming to try a sample. Check with
the health inspector for sampling
requirements. Several farm marketers
have reported sales increases of
400 per cent for some items when
they offer samples! You only need
to sample products that are different
or unique. You will be amazed at the
impact on sales.
Price cards are important
as they
tell your customers the price of all
your products. Most shoppers at
farmers’ markets want to know the
price up front. Without price cards,
customers assume your products
are more expensive than the other