Farm Dinners: Your Most Powerful Marketing Tool?

An open air farm dinner at Tangletown's farm

An open air farm dinner at Tangletown’s farm.

With the advent of the farm-to-table movement, the industry is at a pivotal point in history. It’s safe to say that the public hasn’t been so focused on how and where food is grown since the Industrial Revolution transformed Western society from rural to urban.

And that means farm marketers have an unprecedented opportunity — if they’re willing to take some risks and give the public what they want. And one of the most effective ways to bridge that gap is with farm dinners.

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Farm Dinners? Really?

At first glance, farm dinners aren’t that important. There aren’t that many growers doing them, and they are a lot more work than most want to take on. Add to that the prices you need to charge to make on-farm dinners break even, and it’s hard to see the business sense of hosting them.

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All that is true. That still doesn’t diminish the out-sized impact these dinners have on businesses.

They create local-farm evangelists. In the short term, these super-marketers will take to social media on your behalf, and undertake that most valuable of marketing forms — word of mouth.

In the long term, they will be lifelong believers that how and where their food is grown matters. Their children will be raised to value local growers, which will create future security for your own kids.

Farm To Table: Irritating Or The Industry’s Future?

Before you say it, let me acknowledge that consumer obsession for farm-to-table is highly idealistic and often divorced from reality.

In the real world, growers, whose families have owned farms for generations, are focused on improving yields, reviewing new variety introductions, and simply operating a sustainable business.

The farm-to-table true believers, however, show up at a farm expecting a living illustration of how much the local movement benefits the growers and the community. Exactly what that looks like, they don’t know. Reality will rarely live up to a nebulous ideal.

A scene from the TV show “Portlandia” captures this. A couple aggressively quiz their waitress about where their food comes from. To appease the hipster couple, she gives them a deep background report on their chicken, complete with its birthday, its weight and diet, who its parents were … and its name: Colin.

That scene illustrates why so many are impatient with the local food movement.

If you count yourself as one of the skeptics, take a step back from your cynicism and consider this: if you give this group respect, offer to teach them more about your farm, they’ll be the most powerful marketing tool in your arsenal.

Another thing to consider: Millennials are the heart of this movement. They are now officially a larger generation than Baby Boomers, and their spending patterns differ significantly from both Gen X and Baby Boomers. Millennials want their spending to mean something, and if they feel it does, they’ll spend a lot. And they’re highly loyal once they decide you’re worth supporting.

If your impression of young consumers was shaped by Gen X, you should know the two generations have opposite spending habits. Gen X is not brand loyal and more addicted to bargains. Not exactly a business owner’s dream customer.

But if you happen to own a farm that supplies local food, with Millennials you have a chance to earn a long-term, cause-oriented consumer who will be your advocate to their peers.

And that is why American Farm Marketer focused on farm dinners so often the first few months of its debut. Farm dinners are a VIP program on steroids, a way to serve those who most want to celebrate what you and your family and employees do for a living.

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