by You’ve mastered the art of regenerative farming, opened a profitable on-farm store, and generated a constant flow of sales from local fans of your delicious, farm-fresh goods.
What comes next?
Once you’ve cultivated a solid customer base in your local area, it’s time to expand your horizons and start selling to new markets.
In this blog, we’ll explore the logistics of farm curbside pickup and how this strategy can take your operations to the next level. Plus, we’ll share expert insights from the Seven Sons Farm team — including their top three tips for farmers new to the world of curbside pickup and buying clubs.
Why Should You Offer Farm Curbside Pickup?
In its simplest form, farm curbside pickup lets customers place an order online, then stop by your farm to retrieve their items — allowing for a quick and easy shopping experience.
Starting a buying club is the next step up from this local pickup model.
This approach involves connecting with potential buyers in another city, encouraging them to place preorders, loading a truck with their items, and delivering to a centralized pickup location.
Let’s look at some of the key benefits of starting a pickup-based buying club for your farm:
- Larger customer base: Offering farm curbside pickup in another city significantly expands your customer base, giving you new opportunities to make sales.
- Cost-effective: Focusing on pickup is a budget-friendly alternative to offering delivery. You can load one refrigerated truck instead of investing in food-safe, durable packaging and insulation.
- Scalable: As your farm curbside pickup services become more and more popular, you can add additional stops on your route and cater to new markets.
In short, offering curbside pickup in new cities is a low-risk, beginner-friendly way to grow your farm’s customer base.
The Logistics of Farm Curbside Pickup
Generating enough orders to fill a truck and make your trip to another city worthwhile is crucial for curbside pickup success.
To accomplish this goal, you need a farm e-commerce website. This website helps potential customers find your farm, learn about your offerings, and place their pickup preorders.
Creating an online farm store might sound intimidating, but the right tools make it simple. Look for a farm e-commerce platform with features like:
- A drag-and-drop website builder to help you create SEO-optimized pages for each of your pickup cities and create listings for your farm-fresh products
- Online order management to help you accept and fulfill pickup and delivery orders
- Email marketing tools to help you stay connected with customers in your pickup cities
Your farm e-commerce platform should do the heavy lifting when it comes to your curbside pickup logistics.
Related read: Farm E-Commerce Platform: 10 Must-Have Features & Best Providers
3 Expert Tips for Farm Curbside Pickup
Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s dive into three tried-and-true tips to expand your customer base and boost sales with farm curbside pickup.
These tips come from the Seven Sons Farm team, who used pickup-based buying clubs to grow their business into one of the most successful online farm stores in the country.
1. Focus on Major Cities
One of the biggest mistakes farmers make when starting a buying club is starting small. To minimize travel and take advantage of word-of-mouth marketing, they focus on the cities closest to their farm.
Instead, expand your search to look for the largest market in terms of population density.
While you might have to drive farther, you’ll get a higher return on your investment. Larger cities are home to more people — which means you have access to more potential customers.
The Seven Sons Farm team recommends searching in a 250-mile radius to find cities that you can hit within a day's drive. One of their most profitable routes resulted in a long work day, but they emphasized that it was well worth it to hit Ohio cities like Columbus, Dayton, and Cincinnati.
Pro tip: Catering to larger cities is also an SEO-friendly strategy! Search terms like “grassfed beef in Cincinnati OH” will drive more traffic to your farm website than keywords that include the names of small towns.
2. Start With Temporary Pickup Locations
One of the most challenging parts of offering farm curbside pickup in another city is finding the right pickup location.
However, the Seven Sons Farm team recommends removing the pressure to find the perfect spot by opting for a temporary location. Since your first few pickups in a new city will be small, they’ll be quick enough that you can host them in a large public parking lot.
Once you’ve established a presence in this new city, you can ask your loyal customers for recommendations on where to host.
One of your best options is to partner with other local small businesses like gyms, wellness centers, and chiropractic clinics. These partnerships are a win-win since you can cross-promote each other’s products and services.
3. Promote New Pickup Locations Early
It might sound excessive, but starting a buying club in a new city takes at least a year of planning and promotion.
That’s because you have to attract enough customers to make it worth your time and money to come. Let’s look at a few steps to generate these initial preorders:
- Create a page on your website to announce that you’re offering farm-fresh curbside pickup in the new city. Make sure to include key search terms like the name of the city and the types of products you offer.
- Build an email list to let website visitors “be the first to know” when preorders open for your first curbside pickup opportunity.
- Offer a referral bonus to incentivize members of your email list to invite their friends and family to join and place preorders.
These early promotion tactics will help you build excitement around your first farm curbside pickup opportunity, ensuring you have enough orders to turn a profit.
Bonus Tips for Ongoing Farm Curbside Pickup Success
These are all great strategies for building your initial buying clubs and curbside pickup customer base, but how can you keep them engaged?
Here are the Seven Sons Farm team’s top tips to ensure customers order every time you’re coming to town:
- Offer a wide range of products: It might be tempting to start small by offering only a few products for pickup, but offering your full range of farm-fresh goods will help you appeal to more customers in a new market.
- Rotate deals and discounts: Encourage customers to take advantage of every pickup opportunity by offering different promotions on a rotating basis.
- Stay in touch: Use your e-commerce platform’s marketing tools to send automatic emails to remind customers to place their preorders and show up at the pickup site.
These techniques will help you build excitement for every single pickup opportunity.
Launch Your Farm Curbside Pickup Operation With GrazeCart
Ready to expand your reach and boost your bottom line through the power of curbside pickup? We can help!
GrazeCart is an all-in-one software solution designed to make farm e-commerce a breeze. GrazeCart includes a user-friendly website builder, online order management, email marketing integration, and more to help you attract customers and tackle the logistics of farm pickup and delivery.
See these features (and more!) in action by starting your free two-week trial.
