Today's the day: Farmers' Market Sales 2021 runs this afternoon, free and fully virtual, and if you sell direct you should probably be logged in. We've had more registrations for this one than for most of our spring webinars, and we think we know why — markets in a lot of regions are reopening this month for the first time in over a year with anything close to normal footfall, and nobody wants to relearn a season's worth of stand logistics live in front of customers.
What's actually different this spring
Markets aren't reopening uniformly. Some communities got their first weekend market back in early April with a fairly ordinary setup; others are holding onto one-way lines, spacing between vendors, or capacity limits a while longer, and a handful of towns are staggering reopening dates across several weeks rather than resetting all at once. If your market hasn't told you which version you're walking into, that's the first thing to chase down before you plan your table — the answer changes whether you can offer tastings, how much stock you bring for a Saturday, and even where your tent goes relative to the entrance.
The webinar walks through all of that, plus the parts that don't depend on local rules: how to reset a price list that's been sitting untouched since last spring, what a first Saturday back tends to look like in terms of traffic versus sales, and how to talk to returning regulars about a year of changes to your lineup without it turning into a long story at the counter every ten minutes.
Who this is for
If you've been selling direct through a farm stand, a subscription box, or curbside pickup and are adding a market booth back into the mix, this is built for you. It's also useful if you're new to markets entirely — a few of last year's online-only pivots are testing a physical stand for the first time this season, and the fundamentals are the same whether you're returning or starting from scratch.
Booth logistics get most of the attention in these conversations, but the session spends real time on the quieter problem: what to do with a full year of new online customers once you're back to sharing a sidewalk with them in person. A lot of members built a mailing list or a standing order system during the shutdown months, and the webinar covers how to fold that list into a Saturday booth instead of treating the two as separate businesses that happen to share a kitchen.
Can't make the live session? It's recorded, and the recording goes up in the member portal within a few days. For members who want to go deeper afterward, the Direct-to-Consumer & Farmers' Markets course covers the full season: booth setup, seasonal pricing, and the conversations that turn a first-time market customer into a repeat one.
One practical note before you log in: have your current price list open, and if you kept notes from your last market season, pull them up too. The session is more useful if you're comparing it against your own numbers rather than taking it in the abstract, and presenters tend to build in time for exactly that kind of side-by-side question. If your market association hasn't confirmed this year's vendor fees or stall assignments yet, that's a fair question to bring as well — several members mentioned their markets were still finalizing logistics as late as this week.
We'll follow up next month with a shorter recap post covering what members told us worked and what they'd change for next season. If you try something from today's session, we'd like to hear how it went.
The International Cheese Federation (ICF) and More Cheese are entirely fictional. This post is demonstration content created for MemberJunction. All people, organizations, events, courses, certifications, figures, and quotations in it are invented, and nothing here represents a real association, a real business, a real person, or real professional advice.