Or whenever you need ad hoc retail opportunities

Market farmers have many sales options these days: CSA programs; farmers markets; farm stands; wholesale to restaurants, stores or distributors; and more. Most of these outlets require longer-term commitments, relationship-building, and consistency on the part of the farm. All can hugely benefit the farm, which in return benefits from the same commitment from its customers.

However, sometimes you just want to sell extra produce or flowers. Immediately, and on your own terms. Perhaps you have a glut of unaccounted for product without a ready market. Or, a special occasion such as a holiday that you want to take advantage of for extra sales outside of your existing channels. Or, a season when other outlets, such as seasonal markets, aren’t operating.

Enter the pop-up market. This concept has gained traction in recent years in a wide range of retail industries. The definition is loose, but usually refers to a more casual, one-time (or irregular) retail opportunity, usually hosted in an ad hoc location, such as a parking lot or even inside another retailer’s space. 

 

Two approaches to pop-ups

Our farm, Oakhill Organics, started hosting pop-up markets our first year of farming in 2006, years before we heard the term. We held our very first pop-up market when our local farmers market took a week off to accommodate an annual festival in the same downtown street space. It was the middle of July, all our hard-earned produce was coming into full abundance, and we were dumbfounded to learn that we’d have no market that week. So, we let our regular market customers know that they could come to our farm instead to buy produce. Many people took advantage of the opportunity. That initial experience led to 15 more years of hosting seasonal pop-ups, specifically around the fall and winter holidays.

 

A recent Even Pull Farm pop-up market featured a beautiful selection of produce, a farm “menu” highlighting what is available, a separate point-of-sale area, and plenty of room for people to walk around and shop. Image is courtesy Beth Satterwhite and Even Pull Farm.

 

Meanwhile in 2014, Even Pull Farm started growing and marketing in the same McMinnville, Oregon, community. They also have regularly hosted pop-up markets — one Thanksgiving we were even both selling produce at the same host store at the same time but on opposite ends of the building.

Even though we have overlapped in our community, each farm has approached its pop-up markets differently. To help readers see the potential application in their own unique circumstances, I’ll present both farms as examples as I walk through what you should consider if you want to plan your own pop-up to benefit your farm and your customers.

 

What’s the occasion or purpose?

Before planning a pop-up market, it’s helpful to know why you want to do this. Again, this could serve a farm purpose, such as excess produce that you want to sell at a discount to canners or to sell produce at a time when your market isn’t operating. But it could also be inspired by your customers’ needs, too. Or, the pop-up market could cover both the farmer’s and customers’ needs, which was the case for our pop-up markets.

Every year for 15 years we hosted our “Holiday Harvests,” a tradition we started after that first successful July pop-up on the farm. We started our Holiday Harvest tradition before we’d heard the term “pop-up,” so even though that’s what we were doing I never actually used that phrase until working on this article. Our “Holiday Harvests” were two special custom harvests that we timed just before Thanksgiving and Christmas. They were outside of other normal harvests we were already doing for our long-season CSA program or restaurant or wholesale orders. They were open to anyone who wanted to participate, not just existing customers.

We decided to host our Holiday Harvests because many customers were looking for extra produce for their holiday meals or to stock their winter pantry. Conveniently for us, it was also one of the most abundant times of year, when we still had coolers, storage rooms, and fields brimming with greens, onions, winter squash, potatoes, leeks, and so much more. Even though they took work to organize and harvest, we considered the Holiday Harvests pure profit at the end of the year since we’d already paid most of our big expenses for the growing season by then.

Even Pull’s purpose for starting their pop-up markets was similar. They are a mainstay at the McMinnville Farmers Market, but that outdoor market’s season is limited to months with good weather, and Even Pull found that they had items to sell both before and after that window. They found that hosting a pre-market Mother’s Day oriented pop-up (heavy on flowers) plus a post-market season Thanksgiving pop-up provides a few more sales opportunities for connecting with their customers. 

In 2020, Even Pull also added small every other week pop-ups to accommodate regular market customers who felt uncomfortable navigating crowds during COVID. Even Pull farmer Beth Satterwhite says their customers “really appreciated having the second option but that’s not something we want to do on the regular again,” pointing out that pop-up markets take extra work and are best as occasional marketing venues. That is consistent with what we have experienced.

 

Get the word out

The one big challenge about operating one-off or sporadic pop-up markets is that you will have to work hard to ensure customers show up. It isn’t like being at a farmers market where customers are coming to shop anyway. Unless you find a location with amazing visibility for likely customers (more on location later), you will be 100 percent responsible for getting sales to happen.

To that end, it is very important to have a customer base and existing communication channels for getting news to them. These are, of course, important factors for any successful farm venture, but it’s useful to note that a pop-up market might not be the best marketing venue for a new farm. It will be much more successful if you’ve already connected with customers elsewhere first.

 

 

We started our farm before the advent of social media, and our farm primarily communicated with our customers through our website, newsletters (both print and our blog), and email list. Eventually, we started sharing our newsletters on Facebook, too, so that people who were active there could see our news. We built our customer base over years of selling at farmers markets and operating a CSA in one community.

Even when people decided to move on from our CSA, they were always welcome to continue placing Holiday Harvest orders, and it was a fun opportunity to reconnect with former CSA members as well as current customers or even the occasional person who just happened to learn about the opportunity from our website and wanted to try our produce. Often we’d gain new future CSA members as the Holiday Harvest offered a low-commitment way for people to sample our vegetables.

Even Pull also leans heavily on their existing customer base, promoting their pop-ups on social media, especially Facebook stories and posts, and through email. Satterwhite reiterates that it does require extra communication to be successful, because “it is very easy for a pop-up to bomb” if people don’t show up.

Whatever way you communicate, I recommend sharing the news multiple times and on multiple platforms in the lead up to a pop-up market. These one-off events are easy to slip from people’s minds as so many of us run errands on a routine. You want to help them remember to come. 

 

Location, location, location

After knowing your purpose, the next big question is where to host your pop-up market. Part of the defining nature of these ad hoc retail opportunities is that they don’t necessarily have a set location and can be hosted just about anywhere: a parking lot, at your farm, inside another store or out of the back of your truck. Our farm hosted our Holiday Harvests in literally every one of these options over the years, and they all worked to some degree.

However, when researching your options, you’ll need to consider several components, including: protection from weather (shade from sun or cover from rain and wind), lighting if you’re hosting after dark in the fall and winter, parking and accessibility for you and your customers, space size (will your produce and you and your customers all fit?), and overall appropriateness of the setting. For example, if your farm is like ours, you bring dirt and vegetable debris everywhere you go. Is that okay with your host location? (Tip: bring a broom with you and clean up after yourself, even if you’re in a parking lot.) 

Most years that we offered our Holiday Harvests, we found it simplest to use the same location we were using for our long-season CSA pick-up. These shifted over the years, and you can read about our various experiments in the August 2021 issue of GFM. CSA pick-up was a location our customers generally already knew about, and we knew that it would work for our farm operations in all those factors I listed above. But there were a few years when that wasn’t an option and so we had people drive out to the farm. This was very convenient for us but much less convenient for our customers; we definitely saw reduced participation in those years.

Even Pull has hosted pop-ups in a myriad of locations, including inside coffee shops, a winery, and retail stores that were also open for business. Satterwhite says this has been successful, but that it’s important to be mindful of the host business’s schedule and flow of customers, both for pop-up set-up as well as operation. Choosing their quieter hours can be more successful in this regard. Even Pull’s current reliable host is now inside a large warehouse-turned-public-market that hosts several local businesses on a permanent basis and specifically aims to host pop-up events as well.

 

Order ahead or first come first served?

One of the biggest distinctions between how our farm and Even Pull Farm have operated their pop-ups is the logistics of how people pick out their produce.

For our Holiday Harvests, we always asked people to order ahead. Because we advertised these custom harvests as opportunities to “buy extra for holiday meals” or “stock your winter pantry,” different customers had very different expectations and goals. Some households ordered one bag of salad mix and a bunch of beets, while others ordered over $100 worth of storage vegetables to eat over several weeks.

We wanted to make sure that everyone got their needs met and that we didn’t end up with leftover produce. So, even though it required an extra step for our customers, we thought that ordering ahead was important for our model. We always gave people a deadline for placing orders that allowed us enough time to physically harvest, so they needed to plan ahead and do their homework.

Over the years, how customers placed their orders evolved, beginning with customers calling them in to us (before we had internet access at the farm) and ending with plug-in forms on our WordPress website that provided data in a format we could export directly to a spreadsheet. Oh, so much easier.

In contrast, Even Pull mostly has treated their pop-ups as an extension of their market booth. They do send out an availability list to help people plan, but sales are first-come first-serve. It has taken trial and error to estimate quantities properly, Satterwhite says, but if advertising has been strong, they try to max out what they can bring. They also often partner with local producers of cheese, wine, and meat so their Thanksgiving pop-up can provide more options for holiday meals.

At their 2020 Thanksgiving sale, Even Pull offered three prepackaged box options (“farmer’s choice”) of greens, root vegetables, or squash. Customers could buy these as a “grab-and-go” option, but Satterwhite noted the extra time to plan and pack those boxes.

 

Setting up your point-of-sale

If you’re already doing farmers market or farm stand sales, it’s likely you have a point-of-sale system set up. But, if you’re more of a CSA farm (like we were for most of our 15 years of operating), you’ll need to plan ahead for how you’re going to calculate sales and take money. It’s nice to have a designated space at your pop-up for this, such as a small table or section of a table where people can set their bag and take out their wallet and where you can keep a cash box and card reader.

Because our customers ordered ahead of time, we calculated their sales total and had orders ready to pick-up in individual harvest totes along with a printed Quickbooks invoice. They’d transfer the contents to their own bag (or pick up a paper bag from us) and then pay with cash or check. I kept a cash box for that purpose and for the extra sales we did at our hybrid CSA storefront. Somehow we made it through 15 years of full-time farming and sales without ever taking credit or debit card payments in person (we did take CSA payments through PayPal), but I don’t recommend that for new farmers as we now live in a world where few people carry cash or checks. 

Satterwhite confirms that assessment. Even Pull gets very few checks at this point. They use a Square POS for farmers markets and pop-up sales. They take cards, Apple Pay and cash.

 

Ability to experiment?

As you consider whether to host your own pop-up market, keep in mind all the factors I discussed here. But ultimately, the biggest factor is whether you have the time and product to offer an ad hoc retail event in addition to your regularly scheduled harvest and sales commitments. If yes, then consider how you might experiment. 

Having extra time in the quiet late fall is part of what made our Holiday Harvests feel like a positive addition to our yearly workload. The leisurely day of harvest and then subsequent day of packing and distributing often felt like a part of our family’s holiday celebrations, too. They were the harvests when our growing children were most likely to spontaneously pitch in to help harvest or pack.

For both Oakhill and Even Pull Farm, what began as ad hoc pop-up opportunities evolved quickly into flexible, but reliable independent market rhythms for the farms and their customers. This is one of the long-term benefits of starting something that might initially begin as a low-cost, low-stake experiment. A pop-up market can allow a farm to try selling in a new neighborhood or offer a new product without a huge commitment. Over time, that initial trial can grow into an expanded customer base, a consistently longer marketing season, a beloved seasonal event, or even more.

 

Katie Kulla lives and farms with her family in Yamhill County, Oregon. You can find Katie at 

OakhillOrganics.com and on Instagram: @katiekulla.