Sales and Pricing Strategies

This month with Abundance Cubed we are focusing on how to determine our prices and reading the Psychology of Price by Leigh Caldwell.  I have just started reading it, but wanted to share some of my sales and pricing strategies this week and see how they compare to Leigh Caldwell’s book later.  Here are some things we consider when determining what to grow and how to sell our products at Stone Coop Farm:

​Then we look at the actual production costs per crop.  Our hourly wage includes the cost for Workers Compensation, unemployment, vacation, etc. which is approximately 25% added to the hourly wage we pay to our employees.  

The production costs are NOT our target price for selling our products either wholesale or retail.  It does NOT include administrative costs or profit.  We will look at that next week.
 
Recommended Viewing:  Check out Angie’s recent video when she visited us at Brighton’s Farmers market.  It was a cold wet day and although we are at EVERY farmers’ market from May through October, we cannot ensure that the customers and other vendors will show up.  That means that on these miserable days, we bring back a lot of the wonderful produce we harvested, without selling it.  That is a loss that is also factored into our prices. 

Did You Know that many farmers are not covering all their actual costs when they sell their products?  Many consumers expect to get cheaper prices at farmers’ market than at the grocery store, but what these consumers don’t consider is that, of the actual farmers that do sell at the market, many of them are small farmers that have huge labor costs because they cannot afford expensive automated harvesting equipment.  Stone Coop Farm’s tagline is Friendly Farmers, Caring Consumers because our customers care about the food they eat and the farmer that grows it!  We want to THANK all the folks that support Stone Coop Farm and other small farms in our communities.
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