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How to Sell Out of Chicken Subscriptions
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In this week's episode, Janelle and Erica of Benoit Family Farmstead (MO) discuss how to successfully sell out of Summer Chicken Subscriptions. Erica shares her tips for building FOMO around Subscription sign ups, marketing to local Buyers and packaging meat to move her inventory.
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Transcript
Empowering Independent Farmers
00:00:10
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Independent Farmer podcast, the go-to podcast for do-it-yourself farmers who are taking control of their own business, skipping the middleman, and selling direct to local consumer and wholesale buyers.
00:00:20
Speaker
This podcast is hosted by Barn to Door, the number one business tool for independent farmers to manage their business, promote their brand, and sell online and in person. Let's dive in to today's Independent Farmer podcast.
00:00:42
Speaker
Welcome to the Independent Farmer Podcast. I'm Janelle, CEO of Barn to Door and your host for today's episode. As many of our listeners may be aware, Barn to Door offers an all-in-one business solution for independent farmers who are cutting out the middleman, taking control of their business, selling under their brand, and making sure their customers can purchase from their farm both online and in person.
00:01:02
Speaker
In today's conversation, we'll get into selling summer chicken subscriptions.
Erica's Farming Journey
00:01:07
Speaker
Today, I'm happy to welcome back Erica of Benoit Family Farmstead in Missouri. Erica is part of our Farm Advisory Network and has worked with us for four years. Wow.
00:01:15
Speaker
And since becoming an advisor, it has helped other farmers learn to connect with their local community and scale their business to become their primary source of income. I'm excited to talk to Erica about their summer chicken subscriptions and how they build hype to sell out of their product.
00:01:30
Speaker
Welcome, Erica. Hi, thanks for having me. So excited. There's so much to dig in on. All right. So a big goal of growing a firm. I remember you had a goal early on that we want to become full-time farmers. We want to quit our off-farm jobs.
00:01:46
Speaker
But part of that was just building the momentum around a business. Can you tell us a little bit about that progression? Maybe a quick little synopsis on your farm and then how you got to where you are today in terms of just being a full-time farmer.
00:02:00
Speaker
It's felt like a very, very long journey. We started almost 10 years ago now that we moved to this farm. We bought this farm from my grandma and we started out with just a handful of chickens. My husband knew a friend that had hogs. He called up his friend and all of a sudden we have hogs here.
00:02:17
Speaker
Our goal was to homestead. I feel like a lot of farms start that way where you just homestead and then everybody wants your products because you're talking about how great the food is all the time. So that quickly expanded
Family and Farm Life Challenges
00:02:29
Speaker
our friends and our neighbors.
00:02:31
Speaker
We started looking into pastured poultry. So we started raising our own, butchering our own. We started out butchering like 30 of them a year with my parents.
00:02:41
Speaker
And it was a whole all-day event, just doing 30 chickens. We were hand-plucking them. It was lot. but Is there some of that that was like the good old days? Like you just remember back to getting started?
00:02:53
Speaker
I guess you'd call it the good old days. Thank gosh, we're not doing that anymore. Hand plucking a chicken is not fine. actually Once you know there's a machine that does it and like,
00:03:05
Speaker
five seconds. Like it's hard to want to go back to hand plucking chickens. Yeah. But it's kind of nostalgia a little bit. Like it's a skill we know we have. Yeah. So, you know, 10 years ago, I had, we moved here with a two year old and a two month old.
00:03:21
Speaker
And now we have four kids. The oldest is almost 12. So four kids between four and about 12. So just tagging them along, the entire way. Just baby carriers, strollers, wagons, they're always right there, right there somewhere.
00:03:37
Speaker
So that's been, that's been an adventure. And sometimes I wonder if I would recommend people to have kids while they start the farmer after, after they get going and Right now, all you two are really good help.
00:03:49
Speaker
We work with a lot of young people and I'm always like, look, there's no convenient time to have children, but you know, the sooner you have them, the more time you get with them. right sure I mean, it's hard work no matter when you do it.
00:04:00
Speaker
That's just the net net. But okay. So approximately 10 years ago, poultry, it was great. You really only meant to homestead. I love that your community, everybody wanted more. That was, that's kind of an amazing segue into farming.
00:04:13
Speaker
And I guess you really ended up liking it, right? And then you had hogs were added to that. And then you're fast forwarding now, like sort of, that's a 10 year progression.
00:04:24
Speaker
So how did you get to the point where you were able to, and I think it was just, what was it two years ago now, Erica, where you both had quit your off farm jobs and done full-time farming?
00:04:36
Speaker
Yep. So I've always been a stay-at-home mom since we had our oldest. And then my husband quit his job last April. So it's almost been a full year now. That's pretty exciting.
00:04:47
Speaker
So kind of like, it was probably about a three-year journey of making the switch from knowing we wanted him to be full-time, kind of realizing that this actually could be a full-time job for both of us.
00:04:59
Speaker
So we did I think to our to our family, they thought that we je just went into work one day and was like, I'm done. It came home and we didn't have a clue what we were doing, but we did a lot of back end work.
00:05:11
Speaker
We, we, try to make sure we had enough saved in his 401k that if we didn't contribute to it for a few years, that we would still be able to retire one day and have enough to live off of.
Financial Planning and Security
00:05:23
Speaker
Not an extraordinary life when we retire, but ah bills are going to be paid and we're gonna have something to retire with.
00:05:30
Speaker
So that was a big goal is to just have that peace of mind that if we took a few years to really figure things out, that it was going to be okay. Good for you. We had enough like in the savings that we could go but like six months without sales and we would still be fine.
00:05:47
Speaker
We were very, very conservative in our planning and we wanted to make sure of that there was little chance of failure. We tried to kind of get everything worked out as much as we could that if everything went wrong, then we'd still barely squeeze by, but it would still be fine.
00:06:05
Speaker
You'd be okay. i love that. It's like hope for the best, plan for the worst. Yes. Yes. you know But then like lean heavily into that success. And I think that there's some comfort in that, that you've thought through and did all of that planning.
00:06:20
Speaker
Good for you. Yeah. Even little things like stocking up on toothpaste and laundry soap. like I didn't want the fact that I didn't have toothpaste to you know to break us or something. you know like Not to have to worry about all those little expenses here and there.
00:06:35
Speaker
And then another thing on like the business side was to get our subscription sales up to where we knew that our farm bills are going to be paid, you know, like the feed bill, our biggest bill of the month, that was going to get paid, no problem, just through subscriptions.
00:06:50
Speaker
And then we do like our bulk sales throughout the year and that covered like all of our other costs too. So just really understanding our cost and where our income was going to come from. and yeah, just planning for the worst and hoping for the best.
00:07:04
Speaker
I love that. Which was great because the first month he was home, we butchered all of our chickens and our freezer went out. And so we lost $4,000 worth Oh no! It worked out!
00:07:17
Speaker
Oh no! It worked out! Yeah. Yes. You know, that's that's real life, right? Especially I feel like in farming, you've never met a farmer without a story like that, right?
00:07:28
Speaker
um And that's just part of it is trying to truly lay the groundwork for a successful business and assume some mishaps or some miscalculations or you forecast one thing and another thing happens and things just do come up. And so good for you for planning and coordinating, including around a random transition to full-time farming, which I'm sure a lot of people are very enthusiastic about and we should probably talk about that even more another time.
00:07:53
Speaker
But in addition to sort of planning for adjusting, you know, to full-time farming from a cost perspective, I mean, because that's the beauty of business, right? On the one hand, you have to manage costs and operating costs.
00:08:05
Speaker
And on the other hand, you need to generate revenue,
Sales Strategies and Marketing
00:08:08
Speaker
right? And so there's sort of those two that you're always in tandem, always in balance and making sure that the revenue's outdo the costs basically right and so you've thought a lot about the revenue from your farm you mentioned bulk sales and you mentioned chicken subscriptions we'll talk about deeper so tell people quickly about bulk sales and so they have the greater context to how you're managing your revenue coming through the business and then we'll dig in on chicken subscription so what do you mean by bulk sales
00:08:38
Speaker
So whole and half hogs are our biggest bulk sale right now. We're getting more into the beef, like the whole half quarter beefs. We have a really small herd of Dexter cattle. So we have about eight to 10 calves we sell a year and the same people buy them year after year. And so we haven't really had to learn to market those. We haven't really had to push those much because they just kind of sell themselves.
00:09:01
Speaker
So whole and half hogs have been our biggest bulk sales for the past ah eight years now. I like bulk sales. Some farmers don't really like them as much as I do. But to me, as soon as it goes to the locker, I don't have thousands of dollars worth of cuts in my freezer that I'm trying to get sold before it goes bad or before like the next round comes in.
00:09:26
Speaker
and I'm selling them two, three, four months in advance. Love it. I love that versus last minute, right? Yes. Yes. so I'm planning ahead. I'm several months ahead. And then I'm always sold out too, because I'm planning so much ahead. So that's really created like a FOMO, like the fear of missing out. Like if you don't order this month, then it might be six months before you get your pork.
00:09:51
Speaker
So that's been good. But really even just like teaching people, how to buy bulk. A lot of people don't know. So I've broke down all of that down to just taking a half hog and doing the inventory.
00:10:04
Speaker
And that's part of my blog. I have a blog post of the inventory of a half hog, which includes like the poundage plus exactly how many cuts are in a package, how many packages are those.
00:10:15
Speaker
Just breaks everything down as much as possible for people. But yeah, just making the sales being done. They pay for the entire hog up front or half hog, and then they pay the processor. So that is sales being made. I'm taking care of it. I'm feeding it.
00:10:30
Speaker
And then it goes to walker and it goes to their freezer and have to worry about it after that. And I'll have to worry about my freezer going out. Yeah, exactly. Because you've been there and done that. You're like, no. Exactly.
00:10:41
Speaker
Yeah. So then when it comes to the hog, is that the primary way that you sell the hogs? Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of nice. It keeps it easy to manage. And then on the poultry side, is it primarily subscriptions or is it a mixture?
00:10:58
Speaker
It's mostly subscriptions that we do. So we do our summer chicken subscriptions. That's June through October. And then there's We probably sell like 25 chickens a month in year round subscriptions.
00:11:12
Speaker
But I had to make that to where I wasn't adding in more people because we were selling so much in the summertime that I didn't have enough chickens throughout the winter to to fulfill all those yearly subscriptions.
00:11:25
Speaker
So we've been running under the thousand bird limit. So in Missouri, there's like a thousand bird exemption where we were able to process a thousand poultry on our farm with very little regulations and selling those directly from the farm, which led us to... so last year I completely sold out in a week of sales, pushing our sales. Of a thousand chicken.
00:11:47
Speaker
Yeah. So i had... so i had So now we're building our chicken butcher shop, which will get us to the 20,000 limit. Wow.
00:11:58
Speaker
That's exciting. Yeah. 20,000 chickens seems like an unbelievable number that... I don't know. might get to it. i I hope I get to it. But right now that going from, yeah, 1,000 to 20,000 feels like a huge number.
00:12:14
Speaker
But if we do get to the 20,000 and need to grow, then we can use our same building, have a meat inspector come in There'll be like a few shifts. We'll have to add in more things. But at that point, our meat inspector can come in and we can be USDA or meat inspected or something. So we still have a lot of room to grow.
00:12:33
Speaker
with our building. Yeah. Erica, walk us through the chicken subscription, just the like basics, like the semantics logistics of it. You mentioned, what did you say? June through October subscriptions. And you also mentioned year round. So break it down. If I was a customer going to your site, what would my options be?
00:12:53
Speaker
So right now you have no options because we're sold out, but I tell everybody to watch out for our summer subscriptions. I have already, told people when I'm going to open up the date to open it.
00:13:06
Speaker
So I'm planning on May twelve through the 17th. That week is the only time you can sign up for my summer chicken subscriptions. so that will be about two weeks before we start butchering our chickens.
00:13:19
Speaker
On the consumer end, I do like a small discount if you order them because the way we set up our butchering is we're butchering once a month. And so the chicken subscriptions coincide with that where you're emptying my freezer month after month and I'm not having to hold these chickens and I'm not having to like, you know, hustle them and make room for the next batch of chickens come in because I did all of that sales in one week.
00:13:44
Speaker
So that just kind of keeps cleaning out my freezer. And so they get a small discount because they're helping me out a ton by doing that. It's helpful for me and it's helpful for the consumers too. We love win-win.
00:13:56
Speaker
Yes. Yes. And the consumers do too. They like helping us out. you know, they like to be felt like they're getting helped out too from us. So are people subscribing if somebody shows up and purchases in that? And I love FOMO. We have to dig in on that because you're masterful at the marketing side of your subscriptions, which is so cool.
00:14:15
Speaker
But in terms of the actual product itself, so am I subscribing to one bird to four birds? And is it just June through October or is it like literally is it 12 months?
00:14:26
Speaker
Is it a year round subscription? Okay, so the summer chicken subscriptions is the same length as our butchering schedule. So we butcher from June to October.
00:14:38
Speaker
So that's when they're getting their birds. I have several different options, but I think I'm going to kind of condense it down to probably three different options this year. Another thing I'm doing this year is everything is going to be packaged the same.
00:14:51
Speaker
So like chicken breasts are all going to be two in a package, thighs four in a package. Everything's going to be the exact same. So how I sell my chickens are going to be based on that.
00:15:02
Speaker
So I will do what we call a two cut chicken, which is just two chickens cut up and then we package it based on. So like all thighs are in a package, all legs are in a package you know based on the cuts.
00:15:15
Speaker
So I'll do a two cut, I'll do four cut, and then I do a savings bundle, which is four cut chickens and two whole chickens. Yeah, so the savings bundle is So last year was $115.
00:15:28
Speaker
I'll have to raise my prices this year because of all of our new equipment, you know, all the new stuff we have going on. So I haven't decided the prices just yet on that, but we'll just say 115. And so i really push that one the most.
00:15:42
Speaker
I want people to buy the six chickens at a time because that's more customers that get that the more chickens I'm rolling through and the less orders or people that I'm dealing with that time.
00:15:53
Speaker
I really try to push that for people the most. Most people do order that. So like six chickens over five months, I'm getting rid of, you know, each family's eating 30 of my chickens a year.
00:16:06
Speaker
i mean... It depends on the size of the family. And that's what I love about your three options are, look, a two cut chicken, your smaller box, you know, there's a lot of people who and they're a single or a couple and that's perfect, right?
00:16:19
Speaker
So smaller bundles, a nice option, but there's also people who love the savings and that's also a win-win for you. So it's really neat to see the options because you capture more customers that would want to buy because you offer packages that fit Yeah.
00:16:33
Speaker
yeah Yes. And it seems like in my area, at least people like the idea of buying bulk, you know, I'm pushing bulk sales with my hogs. And so I'm kind of able to like use that same marketing of fill your freezer, but they're able to break that cost down between five months.
00:16:50
Speaker
And it's not so much, you know, if I were to ask somebody, hey can you buy $600 worth of chicken at one time? That seems like a huge number for people. But if I'm like, spend $100 with me over five months or whatever, then it doesn't seem like much. It really breaks it down for people and makes it affordable for them to stock their freezer all summer long.
00:17:11
Speaker
And all year long, they're eating from their freezer directly from me. Again, it's a win-win. That makes a ton of sense. So you sell out in May and then they're subscribing to whatever package they're going to get once a month for five or six months.
00:17:25
Speaker
essentially June through October. But at the end of October, presumably your freezer empty of birds. Your customer freezers are full. Yes. Yes. Now I have like, you know, the 25 chickens per month for the people that have been on my year round subscription.
00:17:42
Speaker
so you know, there's only like a handful of people, but That still feels like three of my freezers full of chicken. But knowing those three freezers are full of sold chicken is pretty exciting.
00:17:53
Speaker
Pre-sold. Yeah. That is awesome. And you're keeping those customers happy. i think there's such a relief in the many farmers I've spoken to when it comes to subscriptions. There's such a relief.
00:18:04
Speaker
And it's pre-sold. It's recurring revenue for the farm that you can...
Building Customer Relationships
00:18:08
Speaker
essentially depend on month over month and sleep better at night because it's, you know, you're selling your hogs ahead of time, you know, in bulk sales, you're selling chickens on subscriptions.
00:18:18
Speaker
either for so you know five, six month period or for year round. And in all those instances, you're pre-selling. And you know what a gift to know that and to have that confidence versus the stress of my freezers are full and I haven't sold these items. I've heard about that stress too.
00:18:35
Speaker
Yes, I've been in that situation too. And going and buying a freezer somewhere last minute is not what I enjoy doing. No, no.
00:18:46
Speaker
Well, that's awesome. Well, good for you. And I'm excited to follow the story of the new processing and scaling up from a thousand birds to at least the official cutoff is 20,000 birds. But we'll see how that goes over time, right, in terms of that growth. But it'll be great.
00:19:01
Speaker
Great to see and great to watch. Okay. I want to, now that we kind of know the logistics of what you're selling from a chicken perspective, I want to get a little bit into the marketing because I know that you even mentioned FOMO at the beginning of our call. Like, you know, the fear of missing out. People don't want to miss out on their connection to buying amazing proteins from you.
00:19:19
Speaker
So let's talk a little bit about marketing how you think about it. You've already sort of tipped us off to like the frenzy around you can buy during this one week in May. for my summer subscriptions, but maybe we back up just a little bit more because we need to talk about the who, like you have customer list, right?
00:19:37
Speaker
So tell us a little bit about how you think about your customers. You're selling direct. The beauty of that is, is you can have those relationships with the customers. You can cut out the middleman and have them appreciate your brand directly, et cetera.
00:19:49
Speaker
But that means that you do need to have a customer list and customer base that you continue to work on and grow and engage. So how do you think about that at a broad level? And then how do you sort of tackle it when it comes to selling a specific product like a chicken subscription?
00:20:04
Speaker
So that was probably one of the first things we started working on was building our email list. My first couple emails really made me realize how important that email list was.
00:20:15
Speaker
Like the first time I had my email list, I think I had like 50 people on my list. We just got a batch of 100 chickens in and we were planning on This is how naive we were. We had 100 butcher chickens.
00:20:27
Speaker
We were going to eat 50. We were going to sell 50. Now, we all know that because you order 100 doesn't mean you're going to butcher 100 chickens. So, of course, like the heat lamps weren't working right. Like everything was dying. It was a whole a whole mess that time. And we ended up selling 50 chickens in like 30 minutes to our email list of 50 people.
00:20:49
Speaker
And I don't even think we butchered 50 chicks. Yeah. but that At that time. So, you know, we had to tell our new customers that we have no idea what we're doing. And we're, know, we're still learning and we're just going to order another batch of chickens and try again. And so we filled as many orders as we could and then we just kept doing it and we kept selling out. And so our first year that we thought we were going to sell 50 500 chickens that year.
00:21:13
Speaker
Oh my goodness. That makes me so happy. Yes. Yeah. that was 2019, 2020, of course, super easy to sell anything food wise because there's no food anywhere. 2021. That's when we joined you guys because sales like plummeted, you know, everybody has their freezer full, know, everybody stocked up as much as they could from us in 2020.
00:21:39
Speaker
And then 2021, realized we're going to have to make a change because what we're doing was not working. So that's when we signed up with you guys. Actually, a guy at a grocery store that I actually used to work at in high school, he was like, you got to go online.
00:21:51
Speaker
He said, that that's the only way to grow right now. and but it's on online So I talked to you guys and signed up. That's awesome. But... Engaging with my customer, I still send email once a week.
00:22:06
Speaker
I like to ask the customers a lot of questions. I feel like that's how we grew our farm. How I've learned anything is just asking a ton of questions to anybody that would that would answer them for me.
00:22:17
Speaker
So, you know, like the mom that's buying a handful of chickens, I ask her how she's cooking them, how she found us. You know, if she found us our website, if she found us on Facebook, if I posted on a local group on Facebook, like i need to know those things so that I know what's working on my end.
00:22:33
Speaker
And then like asking her how she's cooking it, why she's buying it, little questions like that kind of helped with my marketing and how to get other people to buy to me. So the mom that really just wants to cook better food for her family.
00:22:48
Speaker
so I'm able to use that in my marketing. And i feel like I gain a lot of just moms because that's who relates to me. That's who I relate to the most too. Just a mom that, don't know, hotness mom, I guess.
00:23:02
Speaker
I don't know what I'm doing. And statistically, moms are often the decision maker when it comes to buying food in a family. So it makes a lot of sense. And you really hit on an important point there, which is you talk to your customers. And part of that is you know engaging them and building loyalty and rapport. But the other part of it is to your point is to learn about how they're engaging with your product or what you're selling.
00:23:26
Speaker
And that's in a funny way, it's kind of market research because you're learning how they think about and engage your food and marketing really boils down to many times, knowing your customers and what they want and need and expect and even how to delight them. Right. That's really sort of that marketing 101, but it can be done in such a natural way, which I just love. Yeah.
00:23:47
Speaker
Yeah. think I learned that from my husband. But my husband, he's like, he can talk to anybody. And I'm like, how do you come up to somebody and talk to him? And he said, everybody ate last night. Just ask him what they ate for supper last night.
00:24:00
Speaker
And that's such like a genius way to like open a conversation up. But it also helps me on my end too. So that's a fun little thing to just ask people that I learned from him.
00:24:11
Speaker
That might be the best tip of the whole podcast, Erica. You'll have to thank your husband. I will. That's just awesome. I love it. Just everybody ate last night. It's so practical and it's exactly your product too, isn't it? That's perfect.
00:24:24
Speaker
Okay. One quick question in terms of email. We talked about email. You realized how important those were, was collecting emails. Can you give us a quick bullet list of the ways that you would recommend to somebody else out there who's trying to grow their email list and then grow their local community of buyers.
00:24:40
Speaker
couple bullets on how you collect those emails. I need to get better at collecting emails. I will say that. I have hid behind a screen for basically this entire time.
00:24:52
Speaker
Very few people see me out in the world. I'm always in my overalls. And so I do get stopped at the grocery store. So right now, because I'm behind a screen, I don't have time to be, you know, I don't do any farmer's markets, none of that stuff.
00:25:06
Speaker
So like right before I start my summer chicken subscription, I am all over anywhere on Facebook that will, you know, any of those little local groups that will let me post.
00:25:17
Speaker
I'm posting on there. Hey, next week is my summer chicken subscription. You need to be on my email list if you want to know what's happening. Because, you know, if you don't buy from me, you're the only one in the neighborhood not buying from me. ah nice So just kind of creating that hype.
00:25:31
Speaker
If I'm getting ready to do like hole and half hogs, I will do the same thing. Kind of, you know, post around. You need to be on my email list. You're going to find out way more information on my email list than you are on social media.
00:25:43
Speaker
Learned that we were going to build our building. We kind of did the same thing. You need to join our email list, stay up to date with our building. We have a lot going on. I'm just kind of making them feel like they are missing out if they're not on our email list.
00:25:56
Speaker
And I also push like that i educate people. you know I'm not just selling to people. I'm teaching them too. But once we get our farm store going, then I will have a sign up list there where people can, you know, they can sign up whenever they're there, whether they buy something or not.
00:26:12
Speaker
It's also helpful that they automatically get on my email list when they buy through our website. That's extremely helpful on my end that if, you know, if they buy anything, they saw my post somewhere and they buy it, then they're getting on my email list. And that was great.
00:26:26
Speaker
You know, just an easy way for them to be on my email list. So I'm going to try harder when I'm in front of people, which is going to be a whole new skill set for me to learn is to actually in person ask people. It's, you know, it's different when you're hiding behind a screen.
00:26:39
Speaker
so my social anxiety is going to really be tested a lot whenever I am actually out in front of people. I appreciate that to no end. I really do. We have another farmer that often recommends, especially if you have, I think you have a 12-year-old and a 10-year-old at this point, if they're with you at the market, you know, give them a dollar per email that they collect.
00:26:59
Speaker
Or if somebody else is in the booth and it's not you and it's, you know, some high schooler or some somebody who is volunteering to help you, or we have other farmers that you know, swap people out food to help them at the markets, et cetera. But you can have that person collect emails and give them a dollar an email that are collected. Right. And a lot of people have forms.
00:27:18
Speaker
Other people use QR codes so that even while they're waiting in line, they'll be signing up for your emails. So there's some workarounds there. I promise you in terms of collecting those emails, but it is great to catch them.
00:27:30
Speaker
Yeah. The QR codes, maybe i can put those like on my freezers or like, you know, just kind of random spots in there. That's a good idea. be able to do that. Yeah. Yeah, it is important. And it sounds to me like you're emailing folks.
Customer Experience and Engagement
00:27:42
Speaker
So Erica, just to wrap up, I know we've covered a lot today in terms of your subscriptions, how you build FOMO, how you have your email list, how you create that FOMO. They have a certain timeframe and then you sell out. So all very, very exciting.
00:27:56
Speaker
And the cadence that that has with your freezer management too has been just golden nuggets all the way through in terms of advice. Are there any other pieces of advice that you would give to folks who are thinking about doing a chicken subscription?
00:28:10
Speaker
i mean, you were mentioning 2019, 2020, like you learned so much about raising and selling chickens. I don't think you did subscriptions right away. So if somebody is starting to raise and sell chickens, do you have like two pieces of advice that you would just leave them with? Like, here's what I wish that I knew.
00:28:28
Speaker
So that first year is when I got the idea for the subscriptions because people were asking to buy the same thing once a month. So that's when I realized that, hey, just doing a subscription, that would save me a lot of time in the long run.
00:28:43
Speaker
And then keeping an eye on how they were buying and asking them more questions about how they were buying, how they were using it. Some people would buy a whole chicken and go home and cut it up themselves and you know repackage it based on how they wanted it packaged.
00:29:00
Speaker
So just kind of learning how people are wanting to buy your product, how they're cooking it, and just kind of finding that middle ground of what is sustainable for you to provide and what do they like.
00:29:12
Speaker
Because sometimes what they like and what is feasible to the farmer, it may not even mash up. So just... I try to simplify everything I possibly can, which is why, you know we're going packaging everything the exact same.
00:29:27
Speaker
Just kind of making everything simple, but what the customer wants. And sometimes you might just have to kind of ease them into of the direction that makes it easier for us to, show them that it makes it easier for them to.
00:29:41
Speaker
So just kind of trying to find a middle ground of what your customer wants, how they cook, and, you know, what's feasible for us. Thank you. That is just rich words of advice. I love that. It's the win-win. We do talk about, you do have to meet buyers where they're at in terms of how they cook, what some of their expectations are, they want subscriptions.
00:30:04
Speaker
And for you to find that win-win where it's not so outlandish that it doesn't also make sense for you in terms of streamlining and simplifying your business. All very, very important.
00:30:15
Speaker
One thing we didn't hit on that I have to ask is fulfillments, because I know we talk a lot here and talk tons daily to farms about making sure that they understand what sort of convenience customers expect in terms of fulfillments or logistics for them to get the product.
00:30:32
Speaker
And that if you're in a local community, giving them some options in that community can be a game changer in terms of selling out, because not everybody can drive out to the farm every single time.
00:30:43
Speaker
but they know if it's showing up at a nearby pickup or on their doorstep, that can just be the decision-making factor for that consumer to say, yeah, I'm i'm in. That's so easy. And, you know, I know they already know they love the product.
00:30:56
Speaker
It's so much better than where what they can get anywhere else. And so, so often it's that tiny little convenience factor of getting it that makes all the difference for them when they're making that purchase decision.
00:31:08
Speaker
Yes. So currently we've been doing deliveries and then once a month we have two separate, like where we go to a bigger town and they can do like a pickup location there.
00:31:20
Speaker
It's just lovely to hear that you're giving the options for delivery to the folks that are going to, that's the only way they're going buy, right? Because they're maybe busy and they can't make it to your farm store. And then others will be totally delighted to come to your farm store and be able to buy even more local, you know,
00:31:36
Speaker
nutrient dense, amazing products. So it's just great. to i mean, and truly for scaling up is thinking about the variety of customers and sort of meeting them and their needs, which is really, really exciting.
00:31:49
Speaker
Just tons of great advice. Really have appreciated your time and get a good sense of your farm from its beginnings till now, which is just incredible to see how far you've come And so again, i want to extend my thanks to Erica for joining us on this week's podcast episode.
00:32:05
Speaker
You can check out more of Erica and the farm on their Instagram at Benoit Family Farmstead. That's at Benoit Family Farmstead. Benoit is spelled B-E-N-O-I-T Family Farmstead.
00:32:17
Speaker
Here at Barn to Door, we're humbled to support thousands of independent farmers across the country. We're delighted to offer services and tools to help farmers access more customers, increase sales, and save time for their business. If you're an independent farmer who's just getting started or transitioning to selling direct, or if you've been at it for a while and want to simplify your business management, please visit barntodore.com backslash learn more.
00:32:39
Speaker
Thank you for tuning in today. We look forward to joining you the next time on the Independent Farmer Podcast.
00:32:54
Speaker
Thank you for joining us on the Independent Farmer Podcast. At Barn to Door, we are passionate about empowering independent farmers to build a thriving business. To all the farmers out there, thank you for all you do to grow amazing food, care for the soil, and serve your local communities.
00:33:08
Speaker
You are the backbone of our country. For free farm resources or to listen to prior podcasts, go to barntodore.com backslash resources. We hope you join us again and subscribe to the Independent Farmer Podcast wherever you stream your podcasts. Until next time.