Keys to a Profitable Microgreen Business - A Beginner's Guide

so my background is in running a small-scale farm I used to run a one acre mixed vegetable farm on Vancouver Island which is just off the south coast of British Columbia in Canada and it's a very typical model NBC you know mixed vegetables sort of the farmers market for CSAs for restaurants I had a farm stand did a little bit of seed production as well really tried to diversify it was my introduction to agriculture I didn't have a lot of agriculture experience before running this farm with just why it didn't do very well what was Curtis Stone 15 years ago I tell you and so but I did learn a lot I guess two things I learned is what to do and what not to do I learned them equally well I won't make the same joke about the slide that I made last time so in the last you can only recycle stuff so much so in my last year of doing mixed vegetables I wanted to introduce something new to the farmer's market and the farmer's market in Victoria where I went was was a good marker because all the farmers had really unique things and if you go to a lot of farmers markets looks like this guy has beets carrots invented and you know salad mix and she's got the same thing and it was a good market and I thought I did okay at the market but not enough and I want to introduce some new products that could maybe bring some business that other people didn't have and so years before I had grown sunflower sprouts on on a windowsill in in my kitchen and I thought well if I can grow one tray of those I could probably grow 50 of them and it was something I knew what I thought would be a good seller and it wasn't that the market nobody I knew was growing them and in fact a lot of people when I asked asked other vendors about it they were hesitant to grow them because very much people thought of them as sprouts at the time and that's something people avoided so from a business perspective what I done is IIIi thought I had identified a niche crop that I could grow and bring to the farmers market so that's where I started developing this sort of this idea so that was the last year on that farm I left Vancouver Island and moved to Vancouver to go to school and I wanted to keep working on this model basically so I was able to do it as a directed studies project at UBC farm and developed the model and a big part of developing the model was to make a small scale microgreens model that was done in accordance the Canadian Food Inspection Agency guidelines for sprouted seed production so the CFIA in Canada would be the equivalent basically of the FDA in the US and there's not regulations for sprouts but there are guidelines and so I thought if I'm going to develop a model I want to develop it within the context which it exists in our sort of regulatory environment because I wanted my business to succeed and I'll talk about that in a bit so I knew that was something I would have to address eventually so I wanted to start my model in that place basically so the first year like my deliverable for that year was a production manual which we still use and have just expanded it all expanded on and sort of changed as we go we talked about this a bit yesterday it was our standard operating procedures for everything we do was our sanitation prayer plan it was our seeding rates all that so I moved with the farm moved from UBC farm which was really the pilot year onto a private piece of land were expansion started and a big part of expansion now was starting to work with jackass's I mean other people in the neighborhood who were interested in food so so you know once again this was stuff that I'd sort of thought about if I'm going to grow the business I can't do this on my own I'm going to need to bring other people in and so that's what the second and subsequent years were were basically building a crew learning how to manage people as well having run the farm on my own I actually didn't have any management skills I learned very quickly so luckily I was pleasant enough so as you know so the next expansion for the business was was basically trying to increase growth so when we were just a when we made the move and I had a crew we were just producing in the summer producing around 35 or 40 thousand dollars worth of sprouts and so the way to expand the business for us the most logical way was to expand our season so we could go from five months to twelve months so you know we basically have won't tell the whole story but we bought a shipping container and turned it into a greenhouse and so what this did was gave us sort of ultimate climate control and that's the way in and because we've got a fairly mild Mediterranean like climate you can do some pretty good outdoor production in BC over the winter but there's no way I could produce microgreens on their own without any sort of help so the reason for the shipping container there's a couple reasons is well while we were building the business for success I was also building the business for failure so the nice thing about a shipping containers we can just kind of pick it up stick it on a truck and drive it away hopefully to another location and same thing with with the benches that we used in the beginning we made them in four by eight sections and at several points in in production we just added another section on and boom we could grow another 16 trays so it was meant to be expanded expanding meant you know buying another bike trailer buying another cooler and some of that stuff we had already prepared and bought a lot of in the beginning so really planning for that and that's sort of the summary we've got the new greenhouse there we've got the old benches which we still use because it allows us to expand production and then some of the bikes that we use for delivery so what we're talking about here is growing in stages so I've talked with a lot with a lot of you already this weekend and we're just getting into the weekend this week and I get inquiries from all over the place and do consults and I kind of get two different sort of perspectives on thing I get and I'm picking on a few people in this room and like hey I got this cool setup in my basement and then we've got other folks it's like hey I bought a shipping container and a thousand trays and a bunch of seeds that I'm ready to go and they're kind of both ends of the spectrum and I'm very much a growing stages kind of guy and there's sort of four things that I had identified that that did for me because at the time I can't say otherwise as organized as I am now so the four stages I feel I should get into a motivational speech here the four stages to happiness but I will not because I don't know those four stages yet so one of the things is with microgreens is getting to know your crops so if I want to learn how to grow just about any vegetable I can go to an intern on a farm anywhere in North America and learn a lot of that stuff when I started this it was really really hard to find information on on microgreens there just wasn't people doing it there was there's the small people like hey I sprout in jars and then there was the big scale companies who just couldn't sorry I didn't mean to make fun of you views brought in jars by the way I sprout in jars and then there's the big scale companies and they don't tend to share information the reality is now there's actually a lot of fairly decent information out there because of the advances in technology and the sharing people are scaling up microgreens production and and sharing that on the internet so it's a chance to get to know the crops the nice thing about microgreens which you would contrast with any vegetable crop is I'm growing a crop every week so I'm getting a chance to correct my mistakes very very quickly so technically you should learn the trade fairly quickly but because they're very particular crops there are a lot of things that sort of it's a steep learning curve so the next thing was is developing your systems so I talked about systems yesterday and systems to me are about efficiency and and getting on to the next task or getting on with your life and it can take some time to develop them to a really efficient point and for those of you who are running farms you know and in the beginning you know you're working long hours and long weeks and long you know you've got a long season but as you get better and better at things doing the same amount of work becomes a lot easier so as you're scaling up you have to be efficient in order to meet the demands and still have some sort of life so that's a big part of it the other thing and this theme keeps coming up at the conference and I love it it's it's building relationships I'm sorry I might make it a little blurry with the camera this was something I've probably only realized in the past two years the value of this and I think I talked about it a bit later I'm very task-focused I'm very much about getting done as I as I talked about yesterday and that's important that'll always be important in terms of running a business but the relationship piece is huge and the reason is the relationships are long-term tasks are immediate and what we're learning is is we're gay we're now getting customers because we built a relationship three or four years ago and we're getting customers it's not the person I built the relationship is with it's the person that they referred to us so we're really finding that that's paid off in many many ways both with our customers and with our suppliers so our suppliers really go out of their way to look for things that they don't have so that's really made a big difference and tied into that is building our reputation so you know you might you know I'm gonna pick on you Scott even though you're looking at your phone and not paying attention to my presentation at all it's like you know so so you grow a good crop you take it off to the to a chef they buy that's great and then your X crop is good and then your next crop completely fails and you don't know why and then you're like three or four weeks without a crop and you don't know what to do and I have been in this situation so I don't mean to just pick on Scott but over time when you're consistently delivering a good product when you consistently you know your customer service is good your pricing is good you're tolerable when you're around the chef you get a reputation and then people want to work with you so that's something that takes time and it takes longer periods of time with with different folks so if you have particular questions about the stuff we're talking about go ahead and ask at any point if it's something sort of over here and we'll talk about it at the end so if you yeah you can just shout stuff out if you want yeah well wait to the end please no no no no go ahead so in the beginning my main market was so never to repeat the question for the camera how did I deal basically the question is you know when I had these problems how did I approach the customer to deal basically deal with their loss that they would suffer so in the beginning my market was the farmers market so it was my loss if I don't show up at the farmers market nobody's menu is affected right nobody's meal plan is really affected people could get other stuff at the market even though they couldn't get that particular product other failures I had and when I had more restaurant customers I knew well before harvest day that I wasn't getting a crop like I could tell you on day three of germination whether or not our crop was going to be mature so I would call folks up and say like listen we may not have a crop next week weather's been bad or I might have forgot to soak the seed something like that chefs are like great thanks for letting me know they can get this product elsewhere they just can't get our product so giving people as much notice as possible goes a long long way for sure yeah okay so I talked about this and I I alluded to this within the within the beginning part the whole time I'm developing the system I'm developing it to be successful so I'm not thinking about you know what kind of space do I have and how much can I grow in this space it's like how much space do I want to have and how much do I need to have a bigger business so when I showed the the growing benches that we use these were built intentionally to be built quickly rather inexpensively and I just add like literally it's just like adding an apart onto that and that worked really really well for us because literally it's like we've got a few more orders we're on a slightly longer crop cycle so we need more space and I remember once like I think we finished our harvest and I basically you guys do deliveries I ran home to over to home depot grabbed all the stuff put the thing up by the end of the day we had another this capacity for a whole bunch more trays so it was really really designed that way right from the beginning and so if you're if you're kind of looking at a couple things you need to look at is your budget how is that going to change over time you know people often just see a tray and they see a tray equaling twenty dollars and they do this mass in their head that's not really gonna have we're gonna be how it works out when things start to grow let's see what else I wanted to cover on that may I ask the same thing with with the green house as well so our shelving was designed we can we can raise the shelving so we can put another layer up there we can put shelving in between a sort of an in-between layer so we have we have a sense what the capacity is but wewe had sort of stages to get there so we didn't buy all our shelving at once we didn't want to put all that money out because we knew we wouldn't use it all so as it growed we would add a piece of shelving add a piece of shelving add in between shelving so it allowed us to not spend all the money in the outset and sort of expand as we went so this is important if you're you know if had a few conversations if your model is in your basement you know it's a great development model but if you were successful how long could it stay in your basement for so it's either you find another have another space that you can move into or you basically collapse the business if your business wants to grow and you don't let it grow it'll probably collapse anyway so it's a tricky space to be in people often want to keep their business at about this level some businesses that works for for successful businesses it usually doesn't we use yep so that's not that's just that's just been uncovered so it still doesn't have any chlorophyll production I think it's wheatgrass there so it's still yellow yeah we use high-pressure sodium lights this time of year it's not as nice in Vancouver citizens San Diego so yeah basically from about mid-september through mid-april will you supplementary right no we do everything in soil don't we heat the whole space at the Lauder heating pads we priced that out and and just you know it's cleaning and sanitizing that sort of stuff we couldn't figure out how to do that basically high pressure sodium are high in the blue spectrum so the other thing is these lights are there they run at a thousand watts each no I mean high pressure sodium metal metal halide are high in the red spectrum and so red spectrum causes a lot more stretching it actually makes sprouts look really ugly so yeah so high in the blue and either that or I'm mixing it up in my head right now but yeah the other thing with these lights a lot of people in this sort of system would use fluorescents these lights give off more heat than light so we we are actually capturing that heat we want it whereas in most systems you're trying to get it out so yeah the same thing with like with the he mats with the fluorescents having to run lights on every shelf in there just as it's a pain basically yeah yeah yeah yeah there's space at least we've got three units could probably use four and it actually does hit most of both of the three shelves we just rotate the crops once the day on the bottom to make sure that that back part gets enough light yeah weren't you listening yesterday all right I think I covered that yesterday okay so all that said about making fun of people growing sprouts in their basements this was my living room one winter when I'd gone to Terra Madre in in in Italy and came back all inspired and also unemployed I'm like oh what am I going to do for work and I'm like well I've got a product and I've got a customer base so I called up all my restaurants and I said well goodness produce sunflower sprouts this winter want to buy them like yeah so I think I could do 18 trays and I did one harvest a week and from my living room I I basically did $700 in sales and so the way it works out is you can follow me with the camera here this is where I store all like the trays and the soil and all the equipment and this is where I stored my kids toys so the thing with these systems is and I was talking to someone the other day what do I do when I'm making a delivery at a restaurant or I'm at the farmers market and the health inspector says I'd like to come inspect your facility it's like I'm sorry that's not an option it has to be an option so and someone else I was talking to if people said can I can I come see where you grow and this person's growing in their basement is like well no you can't come to my house basically so so there is that whole thing and I think about that a lot now I hadn't thought about it a lot later but one of our ways of attracting customers is getting them to our site and seeing what we do that goes a long way so so yeah if you have cats if you have kids if you have pets if you have a neighbor downstairs oh my god I was a very hated man for a very long time because of how much noise actually just doing this activity all the time made so this was actually a bit of a pilot to see what could we do indoors and and it paid off because it's what led to us doing the container but as a long-term thing this isn't this isn't an option so keep that in mind so here and then there know what this was so the question was did I have any trouble with health inspectors because of this type of setup well no because they didn't know about it but if a health inspector did I'd be screwed like not only would this sketch so I I did get shut down my landlady the woman downstairs called my landlady it said something's going on up there so and something was going on up there like I had like sales charts on the wall and I had a hose running from the bathroom it was a pretty awesome actually it really was I'm washing trays in the bathtub and but I'm sanitizing everything and I got my gloves on so for what it was it was okay but the health inspector no way so not only would this have shut this down but it would have ruined my reputation with the health inspector like any relationship I would have had and even getting into a legitimate business we would have been red-flagged so yeah in in essence if you're really trying to build a bigger business it's a risk so once a week yes yeah yeah and I can't remember what it was I might've been doing two harvests a week actually I can't remember what it was so yeah it was pretty good money from my living room I'll tell you that yeah you were saying yes do you have a relationship with his finger so next slide so so there's two there's the there's a Canadian Food Inspection Agency which is a federal regulator and then there's our municipal health inspector let me I think I deal with both of these oh no I will come to that can we do that the question was he's going to ask it again so if you're wondering I'm supposed to repeat the questions for the camera so this is this is what I call I just throw this in here in the middle here this is what's called the reality check slide because I've been this guy and some of you might be this guy or girl it's like okay I can sell a tray of microgreens to these local restaurants for like 20 25 bucks I take the tray there it's like 20 trays and our 20 bucks a tram and you 100 trays a week that's two thousand dollars and they're doing this math they're doing one side of the math and there's this sort of you know there's an extent to where that starts to fail because in the beginning you know if you've got a basic setup and you're just delivering a few trays to folks you know soil and seeds are your main costs and I think for us to do a tray of sunflower shoots it's about a dollar eighty eight a tray so that's what eighteen dollars and twelve cents profit that's not bad but as your business starts to grow you start taking on all these other expenses that somehow there's a big blind spot in there when you're developing this and these are things like these are the stuff that comes up here are just sort of the inevitable things and some of them are quite big costs that if you're growing food to for sale to the public you can't avoid like insurance like sanitizer like oh we've got way more seeds in that and now we need a place to store them our space is bigger so we're playing paying rent we're doing more electricity this was a big one for us made to pay a bank we pay like 20 or 30 dollars a month in banking fees we couldn't pay cash anymore we had to move to payroll so we're playing employment insurance and workers compensation and you know so then maybe the inspector comes by and wants you to start testing your product and then you've got to get a bookkeeper and then software's like the software we use and you're training folks so if this doesn't have you turned off microgreens I don't know how well but these are just the realities of business so when they say it costs money to make money it's not like you're spending money and investing it there's these are the expenses that go in and this doesn't include your capital expenditures like coolers and you know fridges and freezers and the equipment you're gonna buy these are just the ongoing costs for the product so keep that in mind as you're developing things either grow either grow for yourself and do something maybe for you and your neighbors or be prepared to grow into this as your business grows I assume if you want to grow do microgreens as a business you want it to be a successful business and this is stuff that's gonna come up or maybe not okay okay so local regulations is the next bit here so year five of our production I get a phone call it's ray from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency who says we would like to come and visit your facility and I'm like like we've been waiting for that day and and one of my coop partners is all we should just call them and ask them to come and just do it proactively and I'm like no we should not do that it's gonna happen one day anyways and I'm not avoiding it but going back to planning for success our whole model was built on the inspector coming to see it so anyways he said we'll give a date and we will basically know we'll come and we'll do this we're doing some community outreach to microgreens growers to educate them on the the standards and there's a couple things that we have to adhere to so he comes and he's an experienced inspector and he's got his apprentice with him and that prentices are always the eager ones she just wanted to break us it was a bit unnerving actually and so we spend the next month meaning everything top to bottom organizing everything at right-angles on the shelves putting fresh wood chips down you know putting the proper you know rodent traps in the greenhouse getting all our records in order and then they come and they oh they're supposed to be some pictures here okay it's different without the remote and then they come he pops his head in the greenhouse oh it looks pretty good in here he pops his head in the harvest area looks pretty good in here we spend an hour and a half standing at a table like what and what he wants to see more than anything is our standard operating procedures and our documentation showing we've done our sanitizing so the example I gave the other day was you know when you're in a movie theater and yeah look you're leaving the washroom or is that chart on the back of the door this is time and date and staff signature and there's this random scribble there but this is there your accountability chart basically and that was the thing that they really really wanted to see you know we had some of that but we didn't have a lot of it actually but what was good is we you know he's like well you know and he asks a question cuz he and he knows the answers like so do you have the standing up standard operating procedure manual Michael yeah that's right here they go it's like I'm what about your pest control yeah it's here and we're flipping through the pages and we're flipping through and it really diffused things because he found a number of what we would call minor errors so no there was two major ones actually but a lot of minor stuff but because we had some very very important stuff done he could see we were taking things very seriously so there was no big sort of like you guys got to get your together I can't remember what one of the major things was but one of them was simply we didn't have protective covers on our lights so if that light smashes what's gonna happen it's gonna get all over the crop and then the crop is contaminated now our policy for that we did have was like if a light breaks this is all garbage you know if we send a batch to be tested and it comes back positive for something like we're supposed to show how the batches are separated we can't do that we would destroy everything but they you know they don't want you to have that sort of core destroy everything to deal with contamination it's not a great policy it's not very economical so yeah we bought cover for the lights we for our fluorescent lights that we had at the time you just put these tubes over them and then for there are high pressure sodium we just encased them in a something you would use if you were if you were growing a different crop in BC and you needed to get the heat out of the system so they were upgrades to our system actually there was a cost to it but it made our system better so we had planned for that right so we planned for knowing our local regulations we built the system around that so these are the things you need to consider now going back to the basement imagine it's in your basement they have the inspector just come and you could say yeah it's in my basement but there's my hand-washing station and yeah here's my protocol sheets here and here's all my sanitation records you know so that the health inspector might come in and go you can't have this in your basement but considering it's in your basement you've kind of got your bases covered so if you're gonna do something that's breaking the rules I know how the permaculture crowd likes to break the rules know what the rules are so as an example in our and there's more pictures here mine ran out of batteries at home so as an example because what I don't like is getting caught on stuff you're not talking about so the Canadian Food Inspection Agency guidelines talk about sanitizing your seed and the proportion of sanitizer de-seed I think it was five to one in the standard and look yeah we don't use five to one we use two to one he's like well why I'm like oh well there's no documented proof showing five to one does a better job and it just uses way more sanitizer so we use two to one it works pretty well we've still got to go to proportion and that way we're not using more chemical and he's like okay makes sense so once again they're guidelines so if you're gonna break the guidelines know what they are so you can speak to it and then you can do anything you want really okay there's another picture of clean stuff so you know lots of stainless steel we try to do all that sort of thing one of the things was you know we needed a hand wash station that they at the farmers market and so I'm talking about this like the health inspector says something I'm like okay but the health inspector comes to the market and tells us we need a hand wash station on my conscience why don't they just leave us alone and then I calm down and I do my breathing exercises and count to ten it's like okay we'll just put in a head and wash station the challenge for us is always we were taking everything to market on a bike now we need to carry 25 pounds in water with us now we need to carry so this stuff logistically becomes a very big challenge so anyways we figure that out we just drive it to the market now so with the bike trailer deceptive I know but you do together okay so this is a bit of any question sir did you get all stressful at first for you basement growers then you're like okay I can do this I can do this good and then that answer your question yeah okay I'm gonna I'm gonna tell the camera the question this time okay okay so the question is yes yes so the question is to the health inspector that inspected us now know what happened in the past so in the CFIA case yes they had our previous report so they could look at our previous report take a look at that how did you guys deal with previous things let's look at things and then see what's what's to look out for next year but for the market health inspectors no I don't think they even know there's other health inspectors that work in the same field with them even though they all work in the same office so inspector one comes one day and says oh I'm gonna test your sanitation bottle here oh it's a hundred parts or it's 200 parts per million our book says it's a hundred should be a hundred parts per million I'm like well our book says 200 but okay and then the next week or a couple weeks later another inspector comes and says 200 parts per million okay good and then one person says you can't put your wheatgrass like that and another person says oh I like what you've done with the wheatgrass so there's no communication there and that actually gets very very yeah yeah it's it's a bit oh my god so that's a bit of a challenge because it puts you in the situation of you know do I always try and meet this super high standard or do I just do nothing right and we like to respond to that feedback if we think it's going to make us a better operation but to do stuff just you know to satisfy somebody and it's happy change something and someone will say oh why do you do this and then we'll say well cuz the other health inspector told us to do and they say really why would they tell you to do that him so these are things that the CFI a one was a little better he had our report he followed up on the report great you know that makes a lot of sense to me but every every inspector coming in with a different sort of attitude and a different sort of level of authority or that that doesn't make sense so that may be different in other places but that's how it is in Vancouver yeah anything else sir so generally no we pre-cut we put them in totes and then we package to order that way people can kind of mix and match but we will cut wheatgrass and juice it there at the market yeah the tornado stainless steel juicer thing could survive the apocalypse yeah all right let's go on here okay so this is a bit of a bit of a turn so our next thing here is always attracting new customers now generally your marketing trying to do a decent amount of marketing all the time but one thing you need to remember with microgreens is they're a really nice crop you know and they're they're generally pretty high that they don't tend to stay on menus for very long if you're working with a lot of high-end restaurants they like to change the menu they like to mix things up so you know we'll have big orders from a restaurant for a while they're like yeah we changed the menu if we're done you know or you know it's like we've got a new chef this is a good one we've got a new chef coming in you know they don't want your product anymore or it's something so that change happens a lot with microgreens with a lot of vegetable crops there may be some seasonality but I noticed before was fairly consistent so this change is a lot so yeah we work we're always trying to approach all our types of customers so one of the things I talk about is because we have a lack of diversity in crops we try to have a diverse range of customers and some of them are pretty obvious like a raw vegan cafe and we grow sprouts totally it's amazing how many of them don't want our stuff actually it's kind of bugs me we're hitting restaurants a lot we're always soliciting restaurant checking menus anytime I see sprouts on a menu that we grow I email the restaurant and I mock them for not buying our stuff actually because it means they're carrying a lesser product than they actually could and I do kind of mock them in a very diplomatic and friendly kind of way and it kind of works to be honest sometimes I'm sending these emails often like I send and and it's it's paid off a number of times and then there's a lot of no responses and so I don't know what's going on on the other end there but I'll just pretend they didn't get that one so did you have a question right so the question is do I feel to lessor product because a ship from somewhere else or because our product is superior of course I feel our product is superior I'm totally arrogant about our product because it is superior because we were growing it and delivering it fresh so I know if anything's being shipped in it's two to three days old and probably two through two distributors by the time it gets to that restaurant and I also know based on a lot of experience now that our product keeps longer than anything anybody else is producing so that is a lot of value to chefs and if there's anything that we work on to make sure happens all the time it's that our product is storable so we had a chef come in recently and he said like you know what do you do your pea shoots for and say why we do them for 15 bucks a pound he's like oh that's a really good price we're paying 22 bucks a pound right now and they start going off within three days and I'm like these things start going off within a week I'll replace the full order like it's not even a question so it takes that right off the plate and actually these guys started buying our product a couple weeks ago and like we're gonna take four pounds twice a week which is which is a good order for what we're doing and already they're down to two pounds it's like yeah they're just you know it's not spoiling I'm like okay so this isn't really working so well for us but you know what the low the order now is going to be lower but we've got a loyal customer now because of that right so what I have to do is I look for where our competition is on the menu and I approach those menus those chefs particularly specifically so so yeah so big under that quality piece so yeah I do think our stuff is superior and you should do actually if you're not growing a superior product then then keep working on it because that's what chefs watch they really do okay so these are just some of the other you know so we're selling to grocers choices as a market chain in BC that we sell to and that's made a big different for us and then this is like a little little Portuguese family-owned restaurant just a few blocks from where we produce and we've been selling to them for years and they're now a pickup point for our pickup customers for us and they're carrying our we crush trays and we've probably spent $25,000 in over many years eating lunch there so I actually feel I partially owned that place and they make the best chorizo sausage okay now there is this little disclaimer you need to be prepared this is sort of like you know that dirty little secret about certain things I'm about to tell you the dirty little secret about being a microgreens grower I'm really kind of pissed it's on camera your core customer base is crazy people [Music] this is a problem No so this crazy person is actually my child so that's okay but we deal with some of the strangest people you can imagine I just went to this awesome a health Institute and all they talked about was wheatgrass and I want to get your wheatgrass and this is my dog and listen it's a beautiful sweater and I teach a yoga class and it's it's nice in a way because you know it's it's great that people are coming to us for our products but it's really intense and we actually had to change our whole we used to have people come pickup from us and we'd loved it because they'd come and we could chat and they could see our operation but they would come and they would chat and they would talk and Tom we're trying to work and so we're like we can't do this anymore so we were able to form this relationship with this company where we've been selling for a long time but because people would they and they wouldn't be talking about sprouts they'd be talking about all sorts of things and politics and what their kid is doing and so it's an interesting crowd it really is they're very health focused but they have this whole different lifestyle and it's um I feel bad making fun because they're actually great people but you've got to be ready for that like we didn't really have a sense of what we're talking one day well look who is our core market and they're people often with a very alternative lifestyle with a very different perspective on life not that you people can relate to that but yeah there's there there are a few people who maybe take it a bit far so anyways that said you should focus on relationships and so once again this this team this team's coming up and I do like I'm the guy who sits there smiling like I want to Hue myself but I think it's worth that time right it's a little tricky when we do have a lot of deadlines in our production and it's but it's worth spending the time with a customer but yeah it's um you want to maintain that relationship and so you do it so now what I've started doing is I just as soon as I start talking I don't stop oh we sowed the sunflower and then we just did these different seating densities and seating densities so and reading and sometimes they come up this tall and sometimes they're off like this but the peas they're totally different and yeah kind of then they come and just pick up their bags and they go it's like yeah yeah and how I feel so so I have some I have some crazy person in me too oh god I hope none of our customers see in this presentation okay so relationships like I said earlier it's been it's been a big theme at this conference and it's actually been a big thing us as I mentioned a couple years ago I really started changing my focus from really being task oriented and goal oriented and outcome oriented and really started looking at relationships and you know what did it and I'm so ashamed to say this and I have to admit this on camera as well as it was a Facebook post and it wasn't just a Facebook post it was a sponsored Facebook post it was an advertisement that said focus on relationships not transactions and I look at this thing I'm like god I hate Facebook advertising what is this crap but it kind of stuck with me and then I saw it again and then I saw it again I'm like what does that mean and why am I so sort of triggered by that and it's because I'm very task-oriented get done and it's because what works and what I realized the example I gave myself about how I was focused on transactions was I'd send an email to somebody hey can you help me out with this they might send an email back verifying a few things I'm like yeah that's it they're like yes we can help you or no we can't help you and I drop the conversation I got what I want and I move on to the next thing and I'm like oh well there wasn't really a lot of chance to build relationships there I got what I wanted and I jumped ship and so I started shifting the way I did things and I'm actually I'm using this technique here on you all right now so what when I'm talking to people here like I'm not trying to get anything from anybody I'm just trying to build a relationship kind of with this idea in mind that I'll get something someday but I'm gonna be giving during that whole time as well and it's a really different approach that it's really easy and and now I'm just mimicking way more friends we have way better relationships with our customers things aren't so stressed because they're not it's not all about it's not all about the transaction when I go and do a delivery with the chef we don't talk about sprouts we talk about our kids we talk about snowboarding we talk about when we talk about the weather so it's very different perspective so what we're doing is we're relating to each other as people we're not relating to each other in the roles we have as a producer and as a buyer so that's a big thing here's some of the people we have relationships with Jesse at heirloom now I'm a little pissed at Jesse at the moment actually but we have a good relationship and I'm empathetic so that's okay so Lord we have a lot of good relationships and the thing with actually Jesse's a really good example about relationships heirloom restaurant is about the fifth restaurant we've worked with Jesse at so Jesse just kind of leaves this trail of you know Jesse I'll work somewhere we'll sell there will often keep selling when he moves on we'll follow him to the next place and move on this place turned out to be a gong show which might have been Jesse's fault but yeah so what we're always doing that so you know when chefs move along it's actually a good thing for us because it allows us to open up some more markets okay with the question there was totally and actually so the question actually can you repeat the question make it concise so I can repeat so the question is with chefs moving around a lot do we retain the business and the old restaurant and and move with the chef to the new restaurant so often yes that's the case now what happens when a new chef comes in what is a new chef do this is all over everything and once the Marcus territory or she wants to market her a lot of female chefs in Vancouver right so like sprouts in the menu I don't I don't work with sprouts so I'm gonna bring in endive you know so there's often a lot of change when chefs change because they want to make their mark but what will often do is that's fine for menus change and then six months later we're like hey how's your menu looking we used to sell to so-and-so you know we've been selling 40 years to that person and so we'll get in there at another point basically and that works fairly well yeah so the question is you know did we ever do custom growing I remember this time custom growing for chefs if they come in to make requests will we grow up for them so the short answer for that is no growing a new crop it takes time it takes time to get a new crop in our system and our system is very very intensive we're pushing things on a very very quick cycle so a lot of crops can't handle that so often we'll say well what's the crop and we'll tell them yes or no right away and then what we might do is we'll trial it a little bit and if it works and we can integrate it into our system we'll do it most of the time it doesn't work so we're playing with cilantro right now and what we're finding we're getting a pretty good crop but it doesn't yield well enough and our model isn't built on dainty little micro greens like a lot of companies are like we we grow big hardy ones we won't want to sell big quantities we want to make it more widely available at a better price when we start growing those little ones like the price just goes way way up and it's not them really the model we want so yeah we haven't really had too many of those work out so it's a good model and I think a lot of chefs like that cuz they'll they'll contract a vegetable growers all the time you know I got these beans from my grandmother's garden too you guys grow them out for me and and and farmers will do it but yeah we don't we haven't really had success with that good so maybe cilantro but the cilantro was for Jesse Jesse's not heirloom anymore so I'm not sure what we're gonna do with it so and then so we've got you know good grocer relations as well this is a new grocer that opened up on Main Street in Vancouver and as soon as somebody new opens up that's what we're always looking for who are the new restaurants you know who are the new grocers getting in early because we're kind of saying like hey we've got some brand recognition let us come in and kind of help you along and people do they come in it's like oh hey you guys have food Pedaler sprouts so if we can get in early I think it kind of is mutually beneficial and once again we're sort of building some relationships there so restaurants grocers the best place for building relationships is at the farmers market so we had a campaign last winter was called the shot face campaign so we saw wheat grass at the market and anybody had wheatgrass here yeah great stuff hey these are some of the different faces we got from our crazy customers at the market as they're drinking wheatgrass so actually it was she was the one who came up with it so you know we try to do things to keep people engaged this is Ross one of my coop partners I personally can't stand wheatgrass so I'm right up there with that so um yeah we're always trying to ever since I sort of came on that I'm really really trying to push that and always find ways like how can we engage with people in a way that's not just about here's your sprouts give us your money have a nice day so yeah really focusing on that questions there yeah good okay now I'm gonna go off in another direction as well technology so like I'm pretty sure everybody's got a super computer in their pocket right now that you're using I'm not going to go over the stuff that everybody uses everybody's probably using Google I've got the implant just easier you know email stuff like that but there's a few specific tools that we've used that really seemed to work really well for microgreens some one kind of weird one was home we were designing the shipping container we did the original stuff on Sketchup so it really gave us a sense of the reality of what we were looking at gave us a way to look at a few different designs and that way we didn't have to pay you know an engineer or an architect tens of thousands of dollars just to get an idea of the concept we wanted and it really gave us a sense of what we could and couldn't do it actually told us we mapped out our whole sites and it set exactly to where the Sun is and we could use the program to see where the shadows would fall with differing Shelburne shelving arrangements so it gave us a lot of information so it was a particularly good tool so in the greenhouse itself we use a lot of what is fairly basic technology but very effective technology so we've got you know a thermostat like everybody does but we can control it from from somewhere else via Wi-Fi we've got an attic fan that comes on when it gets to a certain temperature so we can so we can take heat out we've got a carbon monoxide monitor we've got a data logger so we know you know every five minutes that the temperature and humidity is log so we can take a look at our data and we can correlate our growth to our to our to our data in that way so there's a lot of information we can get in our harvest area we've often got our laptop set up there so we've got our order list and we've got our we've got our spreadsheet up there so if things change remember that really bad slide I had up yesterday of the spreadsheet that's it right there it's the orange that stands out there so we can update that as people are engaging with us and picking up order so we've got that up to date all the time so just as I mentioned orders are changing all the time and we're always trying to sow to order we don't want to grow trays that we can't sell so we're always we're like up to the minute we always want to know where things are at so as soon as we get it an order change actually I'm gonna skip the next one and go to soon as we get an order change we put it on our to-do list so we use wunderlist as our a sort of to-do list anything comes up that has to happen we put it there so the reason is when I put it up there everybody on our team sees it everybody gets a notice so when I put up you know traffic needs two pounds of key for Friday you know they know okay well traffic usually gets four pounds now they're getting two pounds so when when it goes to packing they know to make that change and then one of us makes that change in the spreadsheet clicks it off the box everybody gets a message that it's done so it's a way for all of us to know what the other people are doing this one here is our general to-do list it goes way down the screen there and it's just it's often the reminder of like what is the stuff we're up to we had a meeting you know Jamie's gonna write our job description Ross is gonna follow up on the website stuff Chris is gonna go off to a conference in San Diego while we work so yeah it's a good tool and what it does is we're actually looking through that all the time oh when did that happen you know so it gives us a record of tasks we've done and that actually makes a big difference for us over time when we go back to think you know when did we do that or when did that person call going back a little I want to go back to the slaw slide last year we issued 2,500 invoices so up until then we had done everything with those little paper ones and then tried to have a system to mark who had paid and who hadn't you can't do that I don't know how it's done so we moved to mobile invoicing so we actually do all our invoice things so we'll do our delivery or we'll do our harvest we'll get everything ready then we'll all basically do all the invoices up for the route we're gonna do and we've got everything on our phone when we go to make the delivery the customer either pays or signs they sign right on the phone we save that we send it off to them they've got their invoice right away we've got it logged into into our it's basically on the cloud and that keeps track of all our you know who owes who's paid what are customers buying we can we can run a lot of reports on that as well and it gives us a whole bunch of information all in one's one spot don't use invoice to go if you're going to use one it's the best user interface but we have never had so much trouble with a piece of software in our lives I don't know what the alternative is yet we're kind of stuck with this one but I highly recommend electronic invoicing because it makes a lot of sense and in a lot of ways especially when you're dealing with that many invoices and that was the thing for us the volume was just too much to keep up with did I see hands no no no so your question is I don't recommend invoice to go I'm happy to say on camera a third time I do not recommend invoice to go yeah so there are some other ones out there and and the user interface is great and and that features they have are incredible but it doesn't work the coding is all if the development is bad so I sent an invoice to somebody the other day and they're like oh it says we have a $2,400 credit and so when when I had closed off a bunch of bills and for some reason applied them all to one invoice like there's all these little things that happen all the time which you know seem like trivial things but when you're sending invoices and statements out to people and they're coming back with this weird stuff like you know the text is all garbled or it came through black or and it's just so riddled with with problems that it ends up being that we have this whole other system for our invoicing which is a double and a triple check on everything we do with that software so it's made things easier in one way but it's created this whole other list of tasks to manage its inadequacies so we want to switch over to something else but that change is another big change it's getting to know another piece of software's problems and so we're not quite ready for that yet so there then there then drew wonder list when what was the project management or the task management software it's called wonder list with au and it's it's great actually it's it does what it's supposed to do yeah and I use it for everything if you if you've told me something at this conference that I need to do later it's already in wonder list because it's gone it's not in my head anymore so so between Google and Wunderlist I don't even have a memory anymore it's great yeah and even sends me reminders so um here the question there I don't have we lost customers because of our invoice issues I don't think so we have we're probably just not as well respected but I always blame the invoice company so yes the trick is house of a commute with some recommendations for QuickBooks and Square um it's got to be mobile-friendly we looked at we were looking at the quick book ones we're not quite ready for that one yet so and can it take a signature okay well take a look there's more and more coming on like we've been using these guys and we're always checking let's check what's out there now let's check what's out there now so yeah it's an ongoing thing so I'm just noting we've got about five minutes so yeah another um we're close to the end here so now go ahead okay good to know good like it's gonna make a note here in wunderlist no that's not that but actually yeah remember remind me about that later so I think that's that one what else we got here oh yeah so this was one that I mentioned the other day so another one we use and I use this for a lot of different things that's Google Forms so when I said we need to we need to document everything for the inspector we don't have clipboards up all over the place because they're just they're unsightly we do everything on our phone so for logging are logging our temperatures on our fridges when we do sanitation in the greenhouse when we're sewing and what that is it's just a quick form you check your name the crops the number you know what it is it logs the time and date automatically and so instead of pulling out a sheet of signatures we just pull out a database of stuff and the logs at a lot easier so it makes that makes it a lot more a lot more feasible so all that said and I talked about systems quite a bit yesterday and I know you hear about systems a lot what we've also really learned is you can't replace no system replaces good communication so we use all these tools but we've got this redundancy and I know permaculture is big on redundancies we talk about them all the time so I'll put something in Wunderlist and then I'll say it or Ross my core partner did you see that I put that in wonder list like I kind of know he's seen it but he's like yeah oh and I have a question and it leads to these other things and so it's this really really good redundancy we've got that that's working really well for us right now and I say that because we had some people in the coop before who didn't communicate well and that saw a lot of problems and that's probably where we lost some customers and didn't know about it things were getting communicated to us for two or three weeks so we just had like at the farmers market we have someone who picks up some bags at the farmers market and and and I come to the the site on on Monday and they're in the fridge I'm like well how can this be so I call her up and ask her she's like oh well you know the guy forgot them and you know so he just packed me fresh bags there but there was no communication that that had happened so there's all this unknown until that communication happens and we've got a really good system right now there's a yeah there's a communication this is the this is the look joyous I'm gonna take a picture for a presentation slide there's another slide where there's a sort of scowling at me which is the general work environment but I took that one out it really goes a long way and it's kind of like the phone call versus the text message or the email things happen that wouldn't have happened otherwise you know so emails like do you have this yes greats the event but when you're having those conversations in person it can go off elsewhere and and other things can happen so that's what we're really learning we need to communicate certain things using our systems but by actually having some physical communication we can take it a step further so so yeah we've got two and a half minutes we can ask some more questions and then Jean might tell is in here afterwards so anything specific about what we talked about are sort of random stuff about life and philosophy and counselling I do offer that service you know yeah are you should talk to your dad about that okay so first question are we building our own soil no we have it pre-mixed for us so I worked with the company you know they do a lot of different horticulture and greenhouse and nursery soils called them up asked them about their mixes what's the common characteristic about a greenhouse and nursery soil chemicals they're all they all that's all just to sue him to say he's like oh yeah and then it's good so we're talking for like 45 minutes then he's like and I guess you're gonna need the iron magnesium nitrogen mix I'm like whoa no like what do we need that for so I go it's just standard I'm like no no no so we've got a peat perlite compost mix but with lime in it and we've only got about 5% compost in it so it actually took us a while to get to that formulation based on the type of peat actually put a bit of choir in there which is coconut fiber and then the the electrical conductivity of the soil so how rich the sort or the compost was so if you've got a very very rich compost you actually want less of it in there so it's a whole other thing you'll have to come to the workshop on Sunday for that and what was the other question yeah so are we bringing co2 into the greenhouse no so we can we bring in fresh air a lot interestingly though what we had done at one point we were using propane heat in the winter and what was happening is it was sucking all the oxygen out and the plants were getting sick so I took more of an oxygen loss than anything so now we just we have a fan that either comes on with the heat or comes on based on time and is always bringing in fresh air yeah it goes so we can't post it on site and then it goes off into the community oh so what do we do with our do we have a use for our waste soil and what do we do with it if we want to put it back into our system we need to thermophilic we compost it at 55 to 65 degrees for several days several times can't be done on our in our situation we have two things that happen we're right next door to a couple community gardeners and they come and they take it away wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow load or random bag or random total owed and then some of the local farmers will come and take it and use it as a potting mix some folks have used it to build gardens elsewhere so yeah that generally generally like we've got a big backlog right now but that's gonna go out very quick a spring comes on so generally then they can keep up with the pace that we have it's it's our internal policy so where that came from was we we spent a day which there's a cost to that we rented a tractor and there was a cost to that and then we brought in a load of horse manure and there was a cost to that we made a wicked compost pile and it got nice and hot once I'm like what are we gonna do bring a tractor into to turn this against so we're basically in downtown Vancouver is where we operate right so different if we were on land I took a sample send it to the lab comes back positive for Listeria mono you know Health's tomahto in your system so first thing I do which is what you always do is we test it again test it in the same six spots and another six spots it came back negative for a benign Listeria species but after that we're like we just we just can't do that we can't put it into our system it would be it's cheaper for us to buy new soil then to actually compost it and put it into our system and it does get used elsewhere so we bring we do about about a hundred 120 yards of soil a year we have to bring in you

Channel: Diego Footer

Views: 245,670

Keywords: permaculture, farming, homesteading, gardening, microgreens

Id: 5J7ujexMbPs

Length: 61min 17sec (3677 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 10 2017