What we learned from our farm stand’s first year

This was our first year with a farm stand and we learned so much. Our farm stand sold eggs, produce, cookies, and bread. Here’s what we learned and how we’re taking that knowledge to tweak some things and have a successful season this year.

Which products sell the best at a farm stand

We had success selling eggs, we would be sold out incredibly fast. Some days there was a line for eggs before we opened. Cookies and bread were a big hit too. I’m sure there are people anxiously awaiting brown butter rhubarb cookies this spring.

Since we had a lot of people looking for eggs, we would have people come in the afternoon leave empty handed, and I’m sure some people didn’t think we actually even stocked eggs. So we will be implementing a one dozen per customer rule and we’re raising the price from $3/dozen to $4.

What kind of customers does a farm stand draw?

We opened our farm stand hoping to be a great asset for our local community and neighbors. I’m pretty sure that most of our customers were actually tourists or people that stay in their cabins. It comes with the territory, we’re in Wisconsin’s Northwoods.

Unfortunately that means that we can’t stay open past Labor Day. We didn’t have a single customer in the weeks we were open after Labor Day. That means we won’t be able to sell Fall produce or baked goods. As someone that absolutely loves the Autumn season this makes me so sad. Since our customers were those that were up here on vacation they didn’t really go for the produce, typically people that stay at cabins go out for dinners and don’t prepare a lot of food with the exception being breakfast. If it was something that could be used in an omelette it might sell. This year we’ll work on having more items with our customers in mind, I’m thinking that we might try to make goats milk soap and dabble with selling homemade sustainable products that could double as gifts.

When do customers visit farm stands?

Customers would typically visit in the morning, with little to no customers in the afternoon. This year we’ll make our hours shorter and we’ll cut down on the days we’re open, going from open 3 days a week down to 1. So we only have one day a week where we need to bake! I recently watched a video where a produce farm said being open 1 day a week makes it more of an event and more people are likely to come.

Since we’re making it more like an event we might have days where we let people come feed the goats treats and pet them, to make it more of an experience.

Farm stand hours need to be visible from the road

We had signs on our farm stand, but I don’t think they were visible enough from the road. Some locals would stop and say that they never knew when we were open, we had signs in 3 places with our hours. So we will definitely have better signs this year!

Security cameras are unfortunately necessary at a farm stand

Our farm stand is self serve. We unfortunately had someone stealing when we first opened the farm stand. We bought some simple Blink Security Cameras from Amazon and haven’t had any problems with theft since.

I feel like year two is going to be so much bigger and better and I can’t wait to open again this summer!