Selling Your Abundance: An Introduction to Working with Restaurants and Building Farm-to-Table Relationships

Reader Contribution by Eron Drew
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It has been nearly 10 years since my husband and I began selling our excess produce to restaurants and retail establishments within our community. This small leap of faith took us from backyard gardeners to full time farmers at our current farm, Tierra Garden Organics. Oftentimes, on-farm enterprises take root because there is an excess of abundance above and beyond the gardener’s own personal needs. Once the deep freeze is overflowing, the canning is done and the dehydrator is full to the brim, it is time to consider finding a market for your extra produce.  Sometimes, you may only have an excess of one or two crops. In this situation, jumping through the hoops of joining a local farmers market does not really make sense; especially if your bounty is ephemeral in nature (like an excess of beans or peas). However, many local restaurants are keen to start exploring the option of buying local and your overproduction may be the windfall that they are searching for.  Working with restaurants can be tricky for the uninitiated. If you haven’t worked in a production kitchen, you may not be familiar with the pressures or pace of a busy restaurant. Understanding these constraints will ultimately put you a leg ahead when diving into the world of farm-to-table.

Here are a few tips to building a strong relationship with your local restaurants:

Don’t Sell Shake– First and foremost, it is important that the produce you are looking to sell is high quality. This translates into a crop that has been harvested at the correct time of day, has been kept properly hydrated, is relatively blemish free, is of consistent size and color and is as fresh as possible. If you have picked too many beans and are looking for a home for the extra, the time to start calling restaurants is immediately after harvest, not a week after they have been sitting in the fridge. This can take some practice, but it is possible to ‘cruise’ your garden pre-harvest and begin to determine which crops are producing in excess. If you can see ahead of time that you are going to be harvesting way too many zucchini, start calling ahead before the zucchini are ready to be picked and begin to make connections with restaurants that may be interested in purchasing your excess.

Keep It Clean– Busy chefs do not have time to wash away your garden dirt. Properly clean your produce before delivering. Some items are best left unwashed to maintain freshness. Be sure to communicate this with the kitchen ahead of time to see if they have a preference for how the product is delivered. Salad mix and cut greens should be triple-washed and free of weeds. Root crops should be topped and power-washed to remove excess soil.  Spent blossoms should be removed from squashes and cucumbers. All items should be put into a clean container for delivery. Delivering a dirty, raw product is the easiest way to prematurely end a budding farmer-to-chef relationship.

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