One of the greatest lessons I have ever learned in business was the power of perception – and ensuring that expectations are met.
Value is the difference between your expectation and the reality of the product you purchased. Our job is to ensure that those expectations are met – or ideally, exceeded.
Knowing what I know about that, you might think I am crazy for starting a business focused on local food – where product variety and availability are day-to-day challenges. If having kids doesn’t give me grey hair, finding enough local cucumbers in the dead of winter might.
We do what we do because we are driven to build a better local food network. My hope is that you too are buying local to not only reap the health and taste benefits, but also to ensure that local food will continue to be available.
It is not without its challenges. We’ve mentioned it before and this week is no exception.
Lettuce/Cucumber Tease
The weather and Murphy’s law have combined to see some shortages when it comes to the availability of lettuce and mini-cucumbers. I would encourage you to continue to order both of these but ask for your patience if they are not available when it comes to delivery. We will simply remove them from your invoice. The worse thing we could do as consumers would be to stop ordering them. While we don’t have the power to control the weather, or defeat Mr. Murphy and his law, we do have the power as customers to encourage producers to grow more, to expand their operations and to strengthen our local food network.
Breast Reduction
If you have had Pine View farms chicken breasts, you know the incredible difference that a natural protocol makes when it comes to taste. You also know that these chicken breasts were quite large (over a pound and a half for two breasts) compared to the ones you find in the big box store. That size was an issue for some, so Pine View is responding to customer demand and will be reducing the size of the breasts over the course of the coming weeks. That will also have the effect of bringing the price down. We will adjust the price or increase the amount of chicken in your order accordingly. Variation is natural. Uniformity is not.
Transparency
I am sharing this information in the spirit of transparency that guides Local & Fresh. One of the values that has been lost in the industrial food system is transparency. Whether that is in packaging sizes or in the connection that comes from knowing the people who make your food.
I recently had a chance to talk more about this transparency in a segment on the Global Morning news where I made the point that there is something wonderful when the food around our family table goes from being a uniform, processed commodity to being “Tim’s Carrots, Mary’s Lettuce, Pam’s lamb, and Marco’s pizza.”
On behalf of all of the people who produce the bounty we offer, thank you for helping us build a better food network. And to our wonderful, enthusiastic customers: thank you, too for helping to strengthen the network and supporting all the Local & Fresh producers.
P.S. – We continue to add new products to the store each week and have created a special category to make it easier to find the new products as well as the items on sale. Enjoy!