Farm-to-consumer sales: Family-owned operations focus on local customers
Hedgewood Farms and Paradise Meats dive into their family’s operations.
Pastured Free Range Eggs. Credit Marla Biggs
Hedgewood Farms, a local farm based in Kansas, focuses on health for both the planet and their customers, according to Marla Biggs, one of the founders of this farm. Following their retirements from IT, Marla Biggs and her husband Brian wanted to begin working with beef, followed by poultry and pork. Marla said that her business has always had egg layers.
Hedgewood Farms, which is focused on local food, offers various purchasing options for consumers, including farmers’ markets, a web store, and monthly subscribers, she said.
Since the Biggs’ farm cannot raise pastured poultry in the wintertime, the monthly subscription option allows Hedgewood Farms consumers peace of mind, knowing their product will be reserved for them ahead of time, Marla said. She said e-commerce sales allow Hedgewood Farms consistent sales in addition to the ability to plan inventory more effectively.
Marla noted that Hedgewood Farms is focused on growing their subscriptions and their social media. “I think we also feel like because we have a pretty loyal base and a lot of people who are signed up for our monthly emails that if we can focus on trying to market more directly to people who already know who we are, that that can help us grow too,” she said.
This farm emphasizes the notion of “you are what you eat.” “We just want people to ask us questions to let us help try our best to share information with them that will help educate them about what we’re doing,” Marla said. “We really believe food is medicine, that it is pay now or pay later.”
Another business that focuses on local food is Paradise Locker Meats, located in Trimble, MO. Louis Fantasma, plant manager of Paradise Locker Meats, said his business primarily works with smaller family farms that raise heritage breeds of livestock.
“The majority of what we do is copacking and private labeling, but we also have obviously a retail store, an online store, and then we do run and have a local pork program here that we market and sell,” Fantasma said. “We buy hogs from local farmers, that’s about 50 to 70 hogs per week currently that we’re doing from those farmers, and we market and sell all that meat.”
The family-owned farm works with hogs, cattle, goats and sheep, Fantasma said.
Though their copacking clients have nationwide distribution, he noted that their pork program mostly stays local.
In contrast to Hedgewood Farms, Paradise Meats has seen slower growth with their online sales.
“I think we’re on track to maybe triple our online sales this year, but … it’s a very small percentage of our total retail,” Fantasma said.
Paradise Meats is owned by a family that is quite involved with their state and national small meat plant associations: the Missouri Association of Meat Processors and the American Association of Meat Processors. Fantasma is an AAMP board member.
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