Her market opened its season two weeks late this year, and when it finally did, it looked nothing like the one she'd been setting up at for six seasons. One of our farmstead members, a small sheep-milk operation that has been an ICF member since 2017, spent the days before her first market of 2020 bagging and labeling wheels in advance instead of cutting to order at the table, because the market's new rules didn't allow shoppers to handle anything before they'd paid for it.
"I used to sell a fourth of my case just by letting people smell the rind," she told us. "This year nobody's smelling anything. They point, I bag it, they pay, they leave." She said the line moved faster than it ever had, which she wasn't sure was a compliment.
What actually changed at the table
The market required one-way foot traffic through taped lanes, six feet between stalls instead of the usual arm's length, and a hard rule that vendors keep hand sanitizer visible and use it between transactions. She split her stand into two roles for the first time — one person handling money, one handling cheese — something she'd never needed with a one-person operation before this year. It meant asking a neighbor to work the table with her, paid out of a season that was already going to be leaner than planned.
Pre-bagging also changed what she could sell. Tasting had always been how she moved her harder-to-explain wheels — an ash-rind that looks intimidating until someone tries it. Without tastes, she leaned on signage instead: small cards at each bag describing texture and pairing, something she'd resisted doing before because she liked the conversation more than the copy. "I wrote descriptions like I was writing for someone who'd never talk to me," she said. "Turns out a lot of people this year didn't want to talk to anyone. They just wanted to grab something they trusted and go."
What held and what didn't
Her overall volume that first market was down from a typical opening week, but not as far down as she'd braced for, and her pre-order list — customers texting ahead to reserve a wheel for pickup — was longer than it had ever been. That's a pattern several of our direct-to-consumer members have described this spring: less browsing, more committed buying from people who already knew they wanted your cheese before they arrived.
She also noticed something she hadn't expected: regulars who used to buy one wedge at a time started buying two or three, as if a single market trip needed to justify the trip itself. She thinks some of that is stocking-up behavior left over from March, and some of it is people trying to support a stand they were worried might not make it through the season. Either way, her per-transaction total was up even as her overall foot traffic was down, which is not a trade she'd have chosen but isn't the worst one to end up with.
The market's organizers told vendors the layout would likely stay in some form even after distancing rules eventually relax, because the one-way flow actually moved more people through in less time than the old browsing layout did. She's not sure she believes that yet. What she does believe is that pre-bagging is here to stay for her, at least through the rest of this season, because it turned out to be faster for her too — one less thing to negotiate at the table when a line is backed up six feet at a time.
If you're reworking a market stand or a farm-stand setup for a season that doesn't look like the ones before it, the Direct-to-Consumer & Farmers' Markets course walks through exactly this kind of table redesign — pre-bagging, signage that does the selling instead of a taste, and how to build a pre-order list that survives past this year. It's worth an hour if your first market back felt as strange as hers did.
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.