A photo of the stand after the Market ended, while packing up. This year went fairly successful!
Introduction
One of ProFarmer’s key initiatives is our Farmer’s Market Sales, coordinating both organic and free-range eggs and other organic products to the WAB community—not only supporting ethical farming practices, but also raising awareness about responsible consumption. By building community partnerships and bringing quality food directly to families, this team helps cultivate a deeper understanding of what it means to eat well—for both people and the planet.
Event Planning
Our Farmer’s Market team started planning for this event in around January—starting by reflecting and analyzing last year’s Winter Market to see how we could do even better than how we did back then; focusing on what allowed us to do so well, and to make specific elements that caused setbacks to be known and paid attention to.
With the clear analysis of the Winter Market event, we started planning for this year’s event: the most suitable products, concerns with advertising, communication with community partners, stand decorations, pre-event preparation work, and more.
With the rough overview of the event confirmed, everyone was given a job to do in preparation for the event, and we all started work—anything from poster design to teacher communication.
A few days before the event, however, we had to make a major change. We were informed that as a sustainability-approved vendor, our job was actually to instead represent our community partners and encourage sustainability. Therefore, we had to instead stick to products based on our community partners’ main products (or just the products themselves). This meant scrapping a few of our product ideas (e.g. farmer’s sandwich—as it wasn’t representative enough of our community partners and our mission).
How it went
On January 30th, the Farmer’s Market team set up a stand for ProFarmer in the Asian Night Market. We sold Shanshui Naren Dried Apples, Guangxi Mandarins, Jane Goodall Foundation (JGF) Coffee Beans, and planned to sell deviled eggs—which we weren’t able to make, due to issues with the HUB Kitchen booking and a variety of miscommunications.
Reflection
First and foremost, the biggest and most obvious issue with our sales this time around: major, major miscommunications. Due to misunderstandings with the HUB Kitchen’s booking, we ended up being unable to use the kitchen, despite it being vacant. In the future, we could definitely have more thorough communication.
Secondly, our advertising was nowhere near thorough enough. We only stuck signs up on the walls of the HUB, but it doesn’t seem to do very well as an advertising method. To help with this, it would likely be good to advertise elsewhere in places and through mediums where it’s more likely to be seen (i.e., online group chats, announcements, etc.).
Conclusion
Overall, despite having some miscommunications during the Asian Night Market, the overall Market sale went very smooth. We planned better, prepared better and sold most of our products, making huge improvements compared to last year. In the future, we will continue to organize the Farmers’ Market, and focus on improving a little every time, working towards a more advanced level. These markets are not just about offering organic food to our families, but more importantly help cultivate a deeper understanding of what it means to eat well—for both the people and the planet.
