Photo by Joshua S. Hall
The odd man out may still taste as good as its less scarred brethren, but how does a farmer convince his or her buyers this is so?
Often up against Platonic standards for produce, local farmers use market psychology to set their harvests apart from the rest.
Let us explore, for a moment, the unequivocal pleasure of walking through an open-air farmers market: the colors of sustenance surround us on all sides; the smell of vine-ripened cantaloupes permeates the air; smiling farmers offer honest small talk as we eye the colorful fruits of their labor.
To most people, a stroll through the local farmers market on a sunny Saturday morning is a small slice of heaven. Evolution offers a possible reason for it: our foraging ancestors probably felt the same way when they came upon a wild grove of ripe fruit trees. This explanation isn’t comprehensive, of course—it doesn’t say what exactly is so satisfying about rifling through a heap of juicy tomatoes in search of the perfect one. As we walk through a farm stand, what exactly makes us stop at a pile of collard greens for a closer look? Why do we take an interest in one booth’s pile of squash and not another’s?
For farmers who sell produce at local markets, having answers to those questions isn’t just a sales advantage—it’s a bottom-line necessity. As customers, we don’t necessarily need to know the ins and outs of produce marketing, but it just so happens that those answers are pretty interesting.
Color Theory
Any student of marketing can confirm that color is among the most influential components in sales, especially when it comes to food.
In the realm of color science (yes, it’s a real scientific field), one of the most widely accepted explanations for color vision in humans claims that we evolved trichromatic sight for two reasons: to find a suitable mate and to distinguish good food from bad food.1
The science says that yellow and red, when used apart from each other, are the most attention-grabbing colors; but when paired together, they become a psychological hunger trigger for most people. Somewhere along the line, the sales sector caught wind of this. Think about the logos of virtually all popular fast food restaurants: McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Pizza Hut, Sonic, KFC, and many others utilize one or both of those colors in their logos.
Luckily for waistlines everywhere, “slow food” also benefits from this phenomenon; and farmers have the advantage that, theoretically, the natural occurrence of these hues in their produce is what made color such an important factor in food choice in the first place.
Eric Morrow (pictured left), who runs Morrow Farm in Ponchatoula, organizes his Red Stick Farmers Market booth in a way that utilizes color theory with two of the most common rules-of-thumb: spreading around the different green vegetables and placing the yellows directly in the middle. “Yellow is the most attention-grabbing color, so I put my squash front-and-center,” Morrow explained.
His green things—zucchini, cucumbers and green beans, currently—are alternately placed between veggies of other colors, so that all the vegetables stand out on their own accord. This creates a visually attractive, contrasting buffet of color that adds to the appeal of his booth, thus increasing the odds that customers will wander into his space.
Edible versus Sellable
Rarely does an average produce shopper think about it, but the cornucopia that ends up in the grocery store isn’t the full motherlode. The selection we see is only the best of the yield—the straightest carrots, the most symmetrical bell peppers, the most evenly pigmented turnips.
The vegetables that line grocery store coolers are the “cream of the crop,” so to speak, because most grocers only accept the best looking, most flawless selections from farmers. It’s worth considering, however, that these standards of perfection are subjective. Who determined that the perfect carrot should be straight as an arrow, and how have the rest of us come to believe it?
Today’s aesthetic standards for produce are perpetuated by many different factors, including shelf life, selective breeding, and representations in advertisements and popular culture. Unfortunately in the case of supermarkets, shelf life often takes priority over flavor.
The local growers at Inglewood Farm, on the other hand, try to embrace their odd-looking veggies. The farm, which operates out of Alexandria, has sold produce to Whole Foods in the past and currently participates in markets from Leesville to Lafayette.
Elizabeth Cole, Inglewood’s marketing director, said that customers at farmers markets are more open to buying uniquely shaped produce than wholesale supermarket buyers are. “Who doesn’t get a kick out of two carrots intertwined with each other?” Cole said. “We have high-quality standards for our produce at Inglewood, but we’re not afraid to display our oddly-shaped vegetables. Some people really appreciate things like that.”
Morrow takes a different approach to selling his edible misfits. He puts his items through a selection process while setting up his farmers market booth; but as long as they’re unbroken and edible, he doesn’t cull the ones that fall short of the Platonic ideal. He simply sells his vegetables by the basketful—if you want that fat, juicy tomato on top, you have to buy the whole basket, including the odd-looking (but perfectly edible) one next to it.
At a Red Stick Mobile Market in Scotlandville last month, I stood under the shade of Morrow’s tent while a customer hovered over the tomato baskets in front of us. She eventually asked if she could switch out a tomato for one in another basket, and Morrow politely asked her not to. She ended up buying a basket regardless. “I group things together like that for a reason,” he told me afterwards. “I would let everyone mix and match if I could, but no one wants to buy a basket full of cracked tomatoes that a hundred people have touched.”
In the past, Morrow has felt the pressure of wholesale supermarket standards. At the Mobile Market, he demonstrated those standards by lining up two bright-red tomatoes of similar size, side-by-side. “Between these two, this one is obviously my number one,” Morrow said, pointing at the tomato on the left.
He then picked up the other tomato and flipped it over, revealing a small, hardened crack near the bottom. “This one is my number two, because of this crack,” he said. “Supermarkets want stuff with a long shelf-life, and this crack will shorten its overall shelf-life. It probably tastes just as good as every other tomato out here, but a supermarket wouldn’t buy it.”
Large-scale industrial farms, he said, tend to harvest produce before it’s fully ripened—a practice that increases shelf life, but at the overall expense of flavor. “They breed the taste out of it,” he added.
As for the food that doesn’t even live up to the more relaxed farmers market standards, Morrow makes sure that most of it ends up feeding people, whether it’s his own family or someone at a local soup kitchen. Inevitably, however, some of it will end up in the compost heap. Contextually, small farms tend to be far better at minimizing food waste than most large-scale agricultural enterprises; some estimates suggest that up to forty-five percent of the nation’s produce ends up getting tossed annually, and unfortunately, much of it is fit for human consumption.
The Sense of Abundance
A basketful of perfect yellow squash isn’t the only thing that catches our foraging eyes. According to Cole, contrasting colors, textures, and display methods can go a long way in a farmers market booth—especially for a farm like Inglewood, which sells sixty-five varieties of fruits and vegetables.
At a farmers market, the first thing Inglewood does upon arrival is cover the tables and produce bins with high-quality burlap tablecloths. “I see it like making a stage,” Cole said. “It gives the setup dimension.” Next, the vegetables are unloaded. Some of them are piled onto the table, while others are put into wicker baskets. Cole said that filling up the baskets and keeping the produce fully restocked creates a “sense of abundance” that attracts customers, a perception which begins to dissolve if the tables aren’t at full capacity at all times.
As a general rule, she explained, Inglewood’s booth will look the same, no matter which market it’s standing in. The burlap tablecloths, along with the booth’s other visual characteristics, are part of Inglewood’s effort to brand itself. “When people are walking through the market, they’re looking for their people—their vendors, the people they buy things from every Saturday,” Cole said. “When you change things up visually, it can be confusing to people.”
Another component of Inglewood’s image falls more along the lines of community outreach: they hand out recipe cards that call for some of the more unfamiliar vegetables the farm offers. The recipes are lagniappe for customers, Cole said, but they also help introduce people to vegetables that they may have never tried before. “We have a recipe card that uses kohlrabi in a slaw—or, Kohl-Slaw,” she added. “The title makes it sound more familiar to people.”
For farmers who specialize in a handful of items, like Morrow, a much simpler booth can do the trick; but sense of abundance remains an important factor. In addition to Baton Rouge’s Saturday market, Morrow participates in several mobile weekday markets; and for those smaller weekday setups, he ditches the frills in favor of a speedy transaction. “Here, I’m racing against the clock,” Morrow explained while bagging tomatoes and making change for a customer. “I only have a few hours to make as many transactions as possible, so I have to streamline the process.”
Almost as a testament to his belief in efficiency, Morrow noted that when he’s in his booth on a busy market day, he feels more like he’s bartending than selling vegetables. “My bartending experience definitely comes in handy here,” he added with a smile.
The Learning Curve
In the gray area between the output of smaller local farms and the high standards of wholesale buyers, the little guys seem to be aware of what they can and can’t swing—in terms of both sales and food ethics. Many local farmers aren’t willing to sacrifice flavor by harvesting their tomatoes before they’re fully-ripened just so they’ll last a few days longer at a grocery store; but with this brave (but tasty) decision, the farmers are taking on the burden of marketing the produce themselves. It takes an extra effort to sell directly to the public and to sell quickly. Some fall short of complete success, but in the end, many of them gain enough marketing savvy to make it happen.
In his time as a farmer, Morrow has seen newer farms go down before the end of the learning curve, but adds that in most cases, they figure it out pretty quickly. “I’ve learned a lot in the sixteen years I’ve been doing this,” he said. “You could have the best vegetables in the city, but if you don’t sell them the right way, you might not make your bottom line.”
1. http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-1-4419-8873-7_22#page-1
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Weekly Red Stick Farmers Markets
Thursdays
8 am–noon Pennington Biomedical Research Center 6400 Perkins Road Saturdays 8 am–noon Downtown Baton Rouge 5th and Main streets breada.org
