by If you’re not selling your meat, seafood, or produce by weight — you might be losing money.
Selling certain foods by weight is great for customers and businesses alike. But it can also be difficult to manage, especially as your business grows or goes digital.
However, using an e-commerce platform with point of sale features and adopting certain processes can help streamline your variable-weight food sales. In this article, we’ll give an overview of why selling food by weight is important and a few things you can do to optimize how you do it.
Why is Selling Food by Weight Important?
No two cuts of steak are exactly alike — and that’s a good thing. While big chain grocers might try to make everything identical, people who sell quality meat and produce know it comes in all shapes and sizes.
So, unlike a general retailer that sells items by units or SKUs, some businesses sell items using variable weight (also known as catch weight). Simply put, this means setting a price for every individual item they sell based on its weight at the time of purchase.
We talk a lot about variable-weight food items for farms, but a lot of businesses sell food by weight including:
- Meat shops and butchers
- Cheese shops
- Fishmongers and seafood stores
- Bakers
Why not just use the average weight to simplify sales? The differences in prices would hurt your bottom line. Unit prices aren’t particularly beneficial for your customers, either. Selling a piece of meat or block of cheese by unit doesn’t give the customer an accurate picture of what they’re paying for.
Challenges of Catch Weight and Variable Weight Sales
Selling food by weight is essential for farms and meat shops, but it does create some challenges for business owners.
- Labor intensive and time consuming: Having to weigh, label, and package every item by hand is time intensive and keeps staff from doing more important work.
- Error-prone: Manually weighing large quantities of items is error-prone. The most common errors are the result of manual data entry mistakes or mislabeling something in an inventory system.
- Costly: Inefficient sell-by-weight processes can increase labor costs and expenses. Depending on the inventory system a farm uses, customizing it to work with weight-based selling can incur added setup costs, too.
- Compliance risks: The USDA has strict requirements for the packaging of variable-weight foods, and making errors can result in steep fines for businesses.
All of these issues are worse for small businesses, where profit margins are already tight.
5 Best Practices for Selling Food By Weight
Selling food by weight can be tedious — but by following best practices and employing the right tools, it doesn’t have to be. With these tips in your tool belt, your small farm or meat shop can not only optimize your sell-by-weight procedures but also provide a better customer experience.
Here are the top things you need to know to efficiently sell food by weight:
1. Leverage Specialized Inventory Management
When many farms start selling directly to customers, either in person or online, they often choose a big-name point of sale or inventory management system.
Unfortunately, these generic systems usually lack specific inventory management features that support selling food by weight. Some providers will give the option to add these features at an additional cost, but taking a Frankenstein-like approach can add complexity, especially if something goes wrong.
That’s why we always recommend using inventory management tools that are purpose-built for farms. These systems allow farms to do things like:
- Track inventory by weight and by unit (i.e. total weight of sirloin steak and the total number of steaks sold)
- Filter items based on shipment date and delivery method (if you’re selling online or shipping locally)
- Add custom items and prices
- Integrate natively with different weighing scales
- Configure multi-SKU bundles
- Make batch updates to orders
Specialized inventory management is also essential to effectively sell variable weight and perishable items online or offer subscriptions.
Related Read: What Is the Best Farm Store POS Software? 4 Top Options
2. Use a Legal-For-Trade Scale
If you’re selling food by weight, it’s worthwhile to invest in the right scales for the job. Quality scales will ensure you stay in compliance with USDA standards and maintain high customer trust – and for small businesses, customer trust is everything.
Consider investing in legal-for-trade scales, from your floor scales to your tabletop scales. “Legal-for-trade” refers to a designation from the National Conference on Weights and Measures (NCWM) and signifies that your equipment is up to commercial standard.
Already have a set of scales? Check out the NCWM’s database to see if your equipment is up to snuff. If you’re using inventory management software, find a scale that is accurate and connects with your system to help streamline the selling process.
Looking to buy some new scales? Make sure you pick a scale that’s a good fit for your business.
3. Support Flexible Payments and Payment Processing
One of the challenges of selling food by weight is that you can’t ring up a transaction until the moment it goes to the customer. This can make it difficult to offer monthly subscriptions or product bundles since many platforms don’t have a way to collect payment information in advance with only an estimated price.
A lack of flexible payment options can limit a farm or meat shop’s ability to create new offers for customers. And manually inputting an order’s cost right before shipment every time is tedious and prone to error. Some POS systems get around this by asking customers to put down a deposit. But this can be off-putting for customers.
Use a POS system with flexible payment processing that lets customers input their card information and then automatically charge the right amount when the order is ready. This reduces the amount of work per order and is more convenient for customers.
Whether you’re selling food in a physical store or online, make sure you offer a variety of ways for customers to pay, including credit/debit cards and digital wallets for maximum convenience.
4. Create Transparent Packaging
Your labels and packaging are more than just a receipt, they’re a chance to build trust with customers. Put another way, labels and packaging that provide exact weight and price information aren’t just about staying USDA compliant — they’re about being transparent with customers.
An attractive, easy-to-read label is a great way to help customers feel confident in your brand with every order. Software for selling by weight makes creating custom labels easier by integrating directly with your inventory and scale systems so all information is printed on automatically.
Because weight can change slightly between storage and shipment for certain items, make sure any packaging conveys these changes to the customers as well.
Finally, don’t forget about the design of your packaging. Modern point of sale software makes it easy to build brand awareness by letting you put your business’ logo or a particular message right on the label.
So, make your packaging informative — but have fun with it too.
5. Train Your Staff Well
Even if you have a specialized inventory management system and the best scales money can buy, none of that matters if your staff doesn’t know how to use them. Take the time to make sure all of your employees are weighing and packaging food products consistently to reduce errors and for a better customer experience.
If you are using a POS system, ensure every label and sale is being recorded promptly and correctly so that you have an accurate picture of your inventory. When it gets busy, the last thing you want to do is spend time training staff instead of helping customers. But trust us: it will pay off in the long run.
Related Listen: How to Sell Freezer Beef on Demand
How To Find the Right Sell by Weight Software
The right technology partner can help even business owners with decades of experience improve how they sell food by weight. But there are many different systems out there and it can be hard to know which one is right for you.
Even if a software solution lists that it can sell by weight, is it easy enough to use or set up to make it useful?
When it comes to picking sell by weight software, always go directly to the source. See some product demos and ask questions to make sure you’re completely comfortable before investing the time and money into a new system.
Maybe ask some of these questions:
- Is this software equipped to handle the needs of my industry/business?
- What kind of training and support do you offer? What happens if something goes wrong?
- Does the system work online and offline?
- What kind of hardware do I need? Do I need to invest in specific devices?
- What kind of e-commerce functions does it have and how complicated is it to set up?
These are just a few questions you might have, but coming up with a list of questions in advance is always a good bet.
Ready To Enhance Your Sell by Weight Business?
Looking to sell food by weight for the first time or improve how you’re doing it? Then partner with a flexible solution built for the unique needs of small farm-to-fork businesses.
GrazeCart was built by farmers to help meat shops and local farms stay competitive. It features built-in support for selling food by weight, advanced inventory management, customer loyalty programs, and more.
Not sure if we’re the right fit for you?