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Save Time and Automate your Farm’s Pick & Pack Experience
543 Plays11 months ago
In this week's episode, Barn2Door COO, James, talks with Product Manager, Anthony, to discuss Barn2Door’s Pick and Pack List.
These lists offer streamlined order organization to save Farms time on fulfillments. Features of the lists include order overviews, delivery details and printable labels.
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Transcript
Introduction to Direct Farm Podcast
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome to the Direct Farm podcast. The go-to resource for farms across the US looking to grow and manage their business. Tune in weekly to hear tips and tactics from our most successful farmers on how to increase sales, access more customers, and save time and money. We'll also speak with industry experts, business leaders, and partners to share the latest farm business trends selling direct to market.
Meet the Host and Guest
00:00:26
Speaker
Welcome to the Direct Farm podcast. I'm James, your host for today's episode.
00:00:31
Speaker
We've got a great conversation for you today with Barn To Door's very own product manager, Anthony Mayaco. Anthony was educated as a mechanical engineer at the University of Washington, and since joining Barn To Door in 2020, he has served in a variety of roles to best serve farmers. Initially, Anthony joined Barn To Door as part of our success team.
00:00:52
Speaker
helping to onboard hundreds of farms all across the country. Thereafter, he moved into product management to prioritize our engineering investments. And in the past year, Anthony has expanded his responsibilities at Barn to Door to oversee our user experience and support teams as well. It's great to have Anthony back to share more about product innovations for Barn to Door. Welcome back, Anthony. Great to see you. Yeah, great being here. Thank you very much for having me.
Barn To Door's Unique Software for Farmers
00:01:18
Speaker
Well, you've had a really busy year at Barnadore, a lot of things coming out and it's great to see the level of investment that our teams are making to help farmers build a successful business. I'd love for you to share with our listeners what it means at Barnadore to be built for farmers. I know this is a big part of our mission is to serve farmers well. What does it mean, built for farmers?
00:01:39
Speaker
Yeah, something that we're constantly harping on here. It's, in short, every kind of decision and product consideration that we might make here at Barned Door is exclusively made with the lens of like, how would this, you know, kind of feature capability function to help a farmer, right?
00:01:59
Speaker
We only build software for farms to manage their direct sales, whether that's on the retail side, going direct to their consumers or on wholesale side, going to restaurants, grocers, or distributors.
00:02:13
Speaker
And that's our focus. We don't build software for anyone else. It's not businesses that might sell apparel like shirts or shoes or kind of more simple consumer goods like watches, snowboards, headphones, swimsuits, what have you.
00:02:29
Speaker
The use cases here at Parnadore are the farmer, rancher, fisher, forager, whatever classification kind of within those you might choose and trying to help them better connect with those customers. And that's what we think of when we say built for farmers.
00:02:49
Speaker
That's a big deal, right? It's very different than Shopify or Square or Wix, right? Which kind of are horizontal. Those are good products, but they serve everyone. But they're not concerned with these unique use cases specifically for farmers, right? Farming is obviously a very big business. And it would be wise of us, obviously, to stay exclusively focused on those use cases and not get distracted with any of these other things like consumer products or apparel, like you said, because there's just so many nuances to
Challenges in Order Management for Farmers
00:03:16
Speaker
farming, right? It's such a big deal. And I know
00:03:18
Speaker
In our prior conversation, we've dug into a lot of different things dealing with payments like point of sale, mobile wallets, even the refund experience for farmers is different, right? Everything we've done previously, we've talked on managing sales. Today, I want to dive into managing orders, right? Farmers take orders a little differently than everybody else's, not just something that's dropshipped when you order it on Amazon, right? So I'd love to dive in specifically how we can make order management simple and easy for farmers
00:03:45
Speaker
and specifically talk about the pick and pack list, right? And kind of everything in between
Efficient Order Fulfillment with Pick and Pack Lists
00:03:50
Speaker
that. So for our listeners who may not be familiar with these terms, let's just start with a pick list. What is a pick list? Yeah. So in simple terms, a pick list is all the items that
00:04:04
Speaker
a farmer would need to source or supply or retrieve from their freezer in order to fulfill their orders for a given day. So across all their customers, what do they need to make sure that they have on hand? Got it.
00:04:22
Speaker
whether they're picking out a freezer, the refrigerator, or out of the field, literally picking it off the vine, if that's the case. How do they assemble it and make it ready? So why are picklists such a big deal for farmers, right? Particularly, I would imagine farmers at scale.
00:04:37
Speaker
So a pick list is going to be what allows you to aggregate across all the different orders that you have for a given day to know what you need to bring together. So if you have three different customers who each ordered a bunch of ground beef, one customer got 20 pounds, another got 10, another got five, then the pick list would tell you that you need to source or have on hand or pull out of your freezer 35 pound beef. It's the aggregate.
00:05:07
Speaker
of what needs to get assembled, right? So whether it's beef in the freezer or if it's a bunch of Brussels bouts in the field or whatever, you need to know precisely what you need to pick or pull, right? To assemble for your customers. So let's look at the other side of that, which is the pack list, right? So we talked about several customers. So what does, what's the pack list represent in this use case? Yeah. And so the pack list follows right on the heels of the pick list. And once you've got all of that product assembled, ready to go together,
00:05:37
Speaker
A pack list is going to tell you how to break it up, which boxes to go into. You know, customer A got 10 pounds of ground beef, two ribeyes and a chuck roast. And then customer B might've gotten something slightly different, customer C, same thing. So a pack list is going to break down per customer how you need to be prepping and getting these orders together so that
00:06:01
Speaker
know, when the time comes and the box is being delivered or they're picking it up from you at the farmer's market or dropping by the farm store, that product is ready to go and helps just smooth over and make sure it's a easy moment for whoever's working that day at the farmer's market and for the customer just to show up and have their order ready to go. That's fantastic. Well, obviously we're just talking about some small examples of
00:06:26
Speaker
three, four, five orders, right? So I would imagine if I'm a farmer and I'm not using any software today, and we talk a little bit about what this looks like, I would imagine a hick and a pack list, they may now label it as such as a small farmer.
00:06:40
Speaker
they're just probably intuitively just doing this. Like what are most farmers doing this that are kind of small scale and then we could talk about what it looks like as you grow. Yeah. I mean, a lot of farms that we work with historically, they've taken orders kind of over the phone or by email or text and probably a combination of all those things, which can be a bit hectic to say the least to track. And then trying to get that all down on some piece of paper, clipboard, maybe they,
00:07:07
Speaker
get it onto a spreadsheet, but even at a certain point that doesn't scale. So ultimately being able to lean in and have a system that is going to do all those things for you and make sure all the numbers are adding up correctly and you don't have to be double checking your own formulas or trying to decipher your own handwriting is where we are really able to offer that benefit. Yeah, this is a big deal because I know we talked with a lot of farmers who
00:07:34
Speaker
are growing or have ambitions to grow quite large. And the other side of it, we talked with some very large multimillion dollar farms, right, who are doing this with like multiple whiteboards and spreadsheets and one person's managing a phone, another person's got the email, they might have four or five people on their crew and things can get missed. And if you're a small farmer trying to grow on scale, like you said, it can be very difficult to capture it all in one place and make sure the information is accurate.
00:07:59
Speaker
In any case, this is a great area where software can really help by aggregating all these orders, regardless of how they come in, such that we can, again, assemble a pick and pack list automatically. So let's talk about farmers using Barnadore. What this experience looks like if I'm using Barnadore and I've got, let's say 500 orders came in, right? What can a farmer expect to be created with a click of a button for their pick and pack list? What's that entail?
Automating Order Fulfillment
00:08:28
Speaker
Yeah, so if a farmer's going through the barn to door system and downloading their pick and pack lists, the pick list would have a
00:08:38
Speaker
spreadsheet where it would have listed out by day, the different totals that they need to be sourcing for the given days of all the different product skews and items that they might have. So telling them how much ground beef they need to source, how many Brussels sprouts they need to source, how many gallons of milk or whatever it might be. I just want to stop you there really quick because this is a big one because I don't want to lose this, right? So if I've got 500 orders, right?
00:09:05
Speaker
Again, that's a lot of individualized details and information, but the reality is to your point, it says those 500 orders just might reflect 300 gallons of milk. So you've got a group of people who are just grabbing the milk out of their refrigerators to be assembled for those orders, right? And maybe that's a thousand pounds of ground beef across those 500 orders, whatever the numbers may be, but the farmer's not having to collate that manually. That's just software that's actually doing all the math for them, right? It's just with a click of a button, it's just produced.
00:09:34
Speaker
Yep. The farmer's able to just go in and say, Hey, I want the pick list for this Saturday. And it would just be right there, ready for you to work from. That's awesome. I know. I know you're very subtle about this because you're an engineer, which I really appreciate. You're very modest. But for me, and when I talked to all these farmers, I know what a big deal this is. Right. So let's talk about the pack list because this is for me, it's even more exciting. Right.
00:09:57
Speaker
because now you've got all the orders, your pit crews doing their hard work. They're pulling everything out of the freezer, pulling it out of the fridge, getting it out of the field. What does a pack list provide?
00:10:07
Speaker
Yeah, so the pack list is going to be kind of the next step in that process for us crews, whoever's helping assemble the orders and going to be the chance for them to then take all the goods they've got together and sort them out into individual boxes or bags or whatever your system might be. What comes as kind of part of the pack list when you say, Hey, I want the pack list for this coming Saturday.
00:10:32
Speaker
has a couple of different things that come along with it. So if you want it to be in PDF format, you can get that and even kind of change the way the columns are laid out. If you want to get very detailed, there's also spreadsheets. If you are a spreadsheet person, I certainly am. And then beyond that, there are a few other bits and resources that come along with it that are well appreciated by the farmers on the Barnadore platform.
00:10:58
Speaker
The first is going to be a copy of all the receipts for that given day. So if any customers might want to see the receipt of what's going to be in their box, if you want to print them all off, you can just throw a receipt in each box and that can be another kind of.
00:11:14
Speaker
secondary kind of point for your pack crew to be checking to make sure they've got everything. The second piece is pack labels. So this is where a lot of, especially folks that are kind of packing into boxes like to have a sticker that they can just put on the side of the box that'll have the customer's name on side. And if you want to, you can also list the different items that are in the box just to make sure that, you know, if they're going to a CSA pickup
00:11:41
Speaker
or something like that, and there's 30 boxes there that can be very clear for them which one is theirs to go pick out. Or if you've got a team member there that's helping run that or doing delivery, they can help make sure they're grabbing the right box for that customer. This is a really big deal, right? Both on the label side and on the receipt side. I know on the receipt side alone, many farmers today are manually assembling receipts, trying to generate a receipt, whether it's in Microsoft Word or Docs or
00:12:11
Speaker
QuickBooks, et cetera. And they're going through and they're doing that one-off, right? I can't even imagine doing that beyond 10 or 20. You start talking about 50, 100, 500 orders. That's a lot of time, right? So just to be able to generate that all automatically, have it beautiful, the farmer's logo on it, it's just elegant. And like you said too, like for a menu cruise, particularly if you're running deliveries or pickups for a restaurant in particular, they'd love to have that piece of paper that they can check the order and it's
00:12:39
Speaker
delivered with their order right kind of as a sign off right but then the labels to that's kind of next level just to be able to have that just automated so just prints out put on the side of the box and they're ready to go. If I'm a rancher now get a big patch of proteins business and I've got to deliver 500 boxes.
00:12:55
Speaker
One thing I'd be thinking about is I might have some subscription boxes that might be somebody just on a recurring meat bundle, or maybe I'm a produce and produce subscriptions. But I probably also have a bunch of people who might be placing one-time orders. Maybe it's a product that's only available this week. Does a pick and pack list work with subscriptions and one-time orders as well? I mean, will they come assembled and aggregated in one location? Are those two different things?
00:13:19
Speaker
So the answer is going to be yes, that the pick and pack list work across items that are purchased one time and for subscriptions. On your pick list, it would tell you how many subscribers or boxes that those subscribers order need to be sourced and supplied for that week. And then the pack list would be, of course, letting you know who is receiving a box.
00:13:44
Speaker
And then it would be ready to go for your teams to execute on that. So very, very much falls in the boundaries of what we look to provide for and write up that same built for farmers mantra that we like to follow. Yeah. Very easy, very simple. Right. Cause I know many farmers today, if they're trying to assemble subscriptions with other third party applications, I know sometimes other alternatives in the market.
00:14:10
Speaker
You have to have a one solution for running subscriptions, another solution for running your one-time purchases. And there is no concept of a pick a pack list. And even if there was, it doesn't assemble those things together in one location. So that's a really big deal. Cause I know many of our farmers drive 30, 40, 50, maybe even 70% of the revenue with recurring orders. But obviously you're always going to have those one-time purchases that need to layer on top of that. So that's a big deal.
00:14:36
Speaker
What about pickups and deliveries? Does the pick and pack list distinguish between those two or are they also aggregated into the pick and pack list as well?
00:14:45
Speaker
The answer on this one's going to be both a yes and no on it. So the pick list is aggregated across both pickups and deliveries. So whether items are going to be getting picked up or delivered by customers on the other end, it all has to get sourced in one place at some stage. But then when it does come over to the pack list side, there is the distinction between the two.
00:15:09
Speaker
there would be a separate spreadsheet that is generated for pickups and another one that is generated for deliveries. And that deliveries one would have a little more information on it, like the address and that sort of thing to make sure that everyone's on the same page. That's great. So it's smart, right? The pick list is smart. It knows, like you said, it doesn't matter whether it's pickup or delivery, your pick crew has to get the product.
00:15:33
Speaker
But for the pack side, it's separated specifically because those are two very different fulfillment obligations, right? Let's go back and talk a little bit more about pick and pack and specifically for farmers that are of scale and a larger size, right? Because I know many farms today, you know, may have multiple farmers markets. They may have multiple days for pickups or deliveries. Maybe their pick crew only works on Friday, but they run their deliveries and pickups on Saturday and Sunday.
00:16:01
Speaker
Does this work across multiple days or a single day? Can I narrow it down to just a specific location even within those days? What's the level of control that a farmer would have in terms of being able to manage a larger operation at scale?
00:16:17
Speaker
As far as managing and kind of controls on these downloads, I've touched on it briefly before, but a lot of the PDFs and such themselves, you can customize the columns that are going to be showing on them to best fit your
00:16:32
Speaker
system that might be different sets of information, like where you want the address to be showing up versus the name of the item versus the quantity, the item, that kind of thing, whatever's most efficient in your own system. And beyond that, there is the ability to download these pick and pack lists across multiple days. So.
00:16:52
Speaker
If you want to get a pick list looking ahead to the entire weekend or the entire next week, you can go ahead and do that. And the pick list itself, it'll provide the aggregated total values of like what you need to source for the entire week. And it will give you the breakdown down to the individual day as well. What you need to be breaking out and saying like, Hey, you need 150 pounds of ground beef for Monday, 225 for Tuesday, et cetera, et cetera. And providing you some total at the end.
00:17:22
Speaker
And then beyond that, as far as further filtering and getting down into the details, you are able to go through and filter, like I said, not only by the different days, but also by the specific locations. So you're able to say, hey, for one of those given farmers markets on Saturday, I want the
00:17:43
Speaker
pick and pack list for that one specifically so that I know what I'm sending off that direction. You can pull that as well. Of course, it's all going to be included on downloads, even at the higher level, the bigger, less specific ones. But if you do want to drill down and find information for a specific delivery zone or a specific pickup location, you can go and get that information as well.
00:18:07
Speaker
So Anthony, that sounds really elegant, the ability to provide all that filtering across multiple days by location. Does that same capability exist also by groups or types of buyers as well? Because I know many of the farms we work with sell both retail and wholesale, or maybe they have a collection of chefs versus schools. They may sell to, maybe they have a loyal CSA group, which is different than somebody else. Does that same filtering work in that regard as well?
00:18:32
Speaker
It does, yeah, across both the pick and the pack list. A farmer can go ahead and filter down.
00:18:38
Speaker
to only their retail or only their wholesale or only their private customers to accommodate whatever specific needs they might have with that segment of their business. So if they're running their restaurant deliveries during the week on a Tuesday or a Thursday, but then they have their retail fulfillments on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday or something like that, they can effectively isolate the retail from the wholesale side with a very, very simple dropdown.
00:19:08
Speaker
that is super clean and super elegant. And that's wonderful that all of this can just be done with software, right?
00:19:15
Speaker
farmer can just simply rely upon the system to calculate and capture the information correctly, while also deprecating things from inventory too. So it's a very big deal. I know we also work with a lot of farms that are not just doing pickups, but many of our farms are really investing in delivery,
Streamlining Delivery with Routeific
00:19:30
Speaker
right? We know delivery works. We know farmers offer delivery, make twice as much money as farms that don't, because people want convenience. And so I know a lot of farmers
00:19:40
Speaker
are using like routing applications and do the other things to help make delivery more efficient, more profitable for them. Does it pick and pack less work in some sort of export format or how does it work with like a delivery or routing application for farms?
00:19:54
Speaker
So we do have a direct integration on the side, specifically with Routeific, who've been a good partner with us. We have a number of farms who enjoy that integration because it is a one-click button to be able to bring all this data from their pack list specifically and to bring it over into the Routeific application.
00:20:14
Speaker
For anyone who's not familiar, it'll tell you, hey, what's the most efficient way to send a driver out to all these different delivery points across a route? So if they're the milkman doing their run, how do they do that in the least amount of time? Otherwise, we do have some farms that use other routing apps who are able to use the spreadsheet from the pack list as well. It takes a little bit of manipulation depending on
00:20:41
Speaker
Their system usually takes a minute or two to make sure you just have the columns named the right thing. And then you can bring it into other systems as well, if you'd like. So just a very simple, important to another third party application, right? Cause I know there's like a dozen plus different routing apps.
00:20:58
Speaker
Some people use Road Warrior, Route XL, among others, right? So I know many of our farms will, like you said, they'll just take an export, map the columns correctly, and then boom, pull it in, and it's ready to go. So regardless of whether or not you use Routeific, which is a really simple, very elegant integration with us, or another third-party application, but you can get the benefit of the pick and back list offering this type of routing capability for your farm.
00:21:22
Speaker
This has been a very informative and very educational podcast for me as well. And thank you for sharing all your insights here. Before we wrap up, is there anything else that you would like to share about the Pick and Pack List or things that you're looking at in terms of additional improvements or features to come out this coming year?
00:21:41
Speaker
I guess one other piece that jumped to mind during our conversation on the pick list, which is a fun one, is many times farms that we work with will look to supplement their own offerings on their storefront, maybe adding honey from a local apiary or something like that. The pick list also will include a column indicating who the supplier might be. So you would be able to go through and see
00:22:05
Speaker
You know, it might be that local API's name that you need to go and grab 10 jars of honey from them whenever you get a chance. Apart from that, our team is constantly working on a number of different improvements which
00:22:20
Speaker
we do try and make it into our different newsletters. So keep an eye out for those and we'll be doing our best to make sure that we continue to live up to that Belt for Farmers motto that we live by. That's fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Anthony, for joining us on this week's
00:22:38
Speaker
podcast episode, and for your ongoing contributions and leadership of Barnadore. We're really appreciative of your involvement. Here at Barnadore, we are humbled to support thousands of farms all across the country, and we're honored to get the opportunity to learn from many of our most successful farms, which help inform our product roadmap and many investments that Anthony spoke to
Explore Barn To Door
00:22:57
Speaker
today. If you are curious and you want to learn more, you can go to barnadore.com. That's www.barn, the number two door.com.
00:23:06
Speaker
And there you can dive into all the features and capabilities that Barnadore has built for farmers to help you increase sales, access more customers, and save time. Thank you so much for tuning in. We look forward to seeing you next time.
00:23:22
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in. For more free farm resources, tips, and tactics that are most successful farms use to grow and manage their business, visit barnadore.com slash resources. Also don't forget to subscribe to the direct farm podcast to automatically download our weekly episodes. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week.