Early in my first market year it occurred to me that many of our customers were arriving at market hungry. Having left their homes early in order to beat the rush at market, they passed up breakfast. So I began to make and sell scones. These are easy to eat with just a napkin and may be eaten as the eater is walking (and, of course, advertising my scones throughout the crowd!) Since those early days we have evolved to where customers rush into our booth now to make sure they haven’t missed the warm Santa Fe burritos (with which other eaters are walking around) and, yes, we still sell a lot of scones.

Why consider these value-added products? Well, a tasty, portable breakfast item brings customers into our booth first and while they are unwrapping a foil-covered, scrambled egg burrito they are glancing over our gorgeous heads of lettuce, considering our brilliant scarlet queen turnips, and noting the first-of-the-season cucumbers. It’s that simple. Plus a nice amount of money can be realized from the sales of these products.
Our offerings on a recent Saturday included: cranberry or blueberry scones, four flavors of mini-bread loaves (pumpkin, banana, almond poppy seed and lemon poppy seed), warm Santa Fe burritos, two flavors of quiche (spinach/feta and broccoli/cheddar), warm, lo-carb, crustless quiche cups, and slices of strawberry-rhubarb pie; plus less breakfast-related items such as cookies and fruit bars. This is all in addition to our full array of seasonal vegetables.

And the effort is not as impossible as you might think to fit into your harvest schedule. Some of our items are made several days ahead and immediately frozen in containers for market. This works well with the bread-type baked goods and they are merely removed from the freezer on Friday night and allowed to defrost. Pies are made late Friday afternoon while the last of the harvest is being cleaned. The burritos, quiches and quiche cups are made Friday night, refrigerated, and warmed the next morning while we finish loading the truck and trailer.

To transport the warmed burritos and quiches they are placed in cardboard boxes, wrapped with heavy bath towels, and placed into large insulated foil bags, which can now be purchased at most supermarkets and discount stores. This keeps these items well warmed and on warm summer days will usually suffice to maintain the 140 degrees that the health department requires. On cooler mornings we set up an inexpensive chaffing pan with double sterno burners and this works very well for us. The unit is set into a plastic tub to prevent the wind from blowing out the sterno flames and the chaffing pan is covered with a towel to retain heat. These chaffing units are easily found where catering supplies are offered, such as Costco.

Our baked goods are displayed on ceramic plates with plastic domes keeping them covered. Tongs are used for serving and the customers receive their purchases either in a waxed bagel-type bag or on a paper napkin, as they desire. We use foam, carryout type containers (also available at Costco) for slices of pie or quiche and we will offer a fork if they plan to eat immediately. A supply of aluminum pie pans for serving larger orders is kept on hand and several of our customers bring us clean, odd “throw-away” type containers like the aluminum pie pans to reuse.

One year we also served organic coffee because our market was located away from any coffee source and, our customers told us it saved them a stop. At our current location there are several coffee shops and we didn’t want to compete with the local merchants in that way. Serving coffee is not as difficult at it may seem, even without water or electricity. We made a cold-process, low acid coffee concentrate in both regular and decaffeinated coffee. The system we used makes about 80 ounces of concentrate and each cup of coffee requires only an ounce of the concentrate. We would bring the concentrate in plastic containers and measure out the correct amount of concentrate for our pump pots, add boiling water and the coffee was ready! The boiling water was created from a five-gallon jug of filtered water that was heated on a propane stove in a lovely harmonic teapot (which our customers learned to listen for). The coffee was served in non-bleached cups and we offered organic half & half, soy creamer (both flavored and plain) and organic sugar. Coffee stirrers and a spoon for the sugar bowl completed the set up.

Again, this brought customers into our booth upon arrival and also created a little social area for customers to stop and talk with each other. We did keep the coffee area off to the side somewhat to avoid blocking customers from our tables. And we did a fair amount of business with the other vendors and continue to do so with our scones, quiches, and burritos.

We are currently considering ideas for lunch items. Our market is located in a nice, older shopping area and customers continue to shop the market right up to closing so we feel that a ready-to-eat lunch item or two could be very successful. It’s finding the time to slip in one more prepared item that may be difficult!

Joan Vibert grows vegetables and makes value-added products from Windwalker Farm in Ottawa, Kansas. She can be reached at joan@windwalker-farm.com.