September 15th, 2020

As part of trying to stay connected to our customers in our new reality we, at Elmridge, have put more effort into social media. I, myself, am not a person hooked into social media. No Twitter, no Instagram, no Snap Chat, no Linkedin and certainly not Facebook! I operate on a “need to know” basis and generally I don’t……need to know. Having said that, I am very happy that most of our valued customers are social media users and we are able to convey our story to you. As part of staying connected I have been volun-told to do a weekly “blurb” that will hopefully be interesting, informative and helpful (and probably quite sarcastic at times). So here we go……

Just a broad picture update for this week.

The decade was off to an average start. We were convinced this was the year we would get rich since the previous two had been a disaster thanks to weather related issues. And then March 13th happened. We found out at 1:00 PM, after already packing for market, that the Seaport was closed until further notice. The next weekend we lost the Forum market.

But we were lucky. We had already been thinking about opening our own online store and thanks to my wife Suzanne’s (the real boss) insistence, we were already working toward a June 2020 opening instead of waiting until 2021 as I had suggested. With a concentrated effort we were able to have our online store up and running by the the following Wednesday, March 18. And from then until now it has become increasingly obvious that the bright spot in our future is likely going to be our online store. It’s been very steep learning curve but when the option is do or die one tends to find the stamina. The learning curve has led to a lot of screw-ups on our end and frustrations on your end as I am sure many of you can attest to. Thank you for sticking with us as we try to improve our service and management of what is a very new frontier. To be able to list products, put products on hold or delist products has required a whole new level of forecasting and management. In the good old days we took product to market and if we sold out and you missed out that was a fact of life we all understood. Now if we oversell it becomes a much more complex problem. Food production is still where our very developed society meets reality and perfect consistency and supply is very hard to achieve, especially when the bulk of it comes from one farm.

We are back at The Forum, The Seaport and Wolfville farmers markets but we have altered our retail procedures to simultaneously reduce the chance of spreading Covid 19 and improve food safety overall. We are offering you a system that ensures that no other consumer has had the opportunity to touch a product and potentially contaminate it. In all honesty, the retail model where everyone is free to touch anything and then put it back has bothered me more and more over the years. We have gone to great lengths to follow food safety protocol on the farm and then all of that work is thrown out the window when someone handles food and then puts it back. We have absolutely no way of knowing for sure that someone has clean hands. ICK!
We don’t have all of the kinks worked out of this system yet but we are thinking hard about how to make it both streamline and a step above in food safety.

By the way; 2021 is now the year that we will absolutely, for sure get rich :-)

Keep eating your veggies and we will keep on growing them.

Greg Gerrits
Elmridge Farm