$9 JAR OF PICKLES
What makes local food twice the price? Over 50 farmers and foodies give their answers at Fermentation Fest.
SPONSORED BY
REEDSBURG WI
I pulled into the city of Reedsburg Wisconsin (population 9,487) to meet with the founders of Worm Farm Institute, Jay and Donna Neuwirth. Over tea, Donna explained why their annual Fermentation Fest and the accompanying FarmArt DTour are so damn cool. One of the things that caught my attention was when Donna mentioned the selling of local food at prices that sustain local growers…
“…like $9 pickles jars. Very high end food. But it’s also good for the locals because they see what is valued and kind of develop ideas.”
What makes a jar of pickles worth $9? That’s twice or triple the price we would think of paying for run-of-the-mill pickles. The question really stuck with me because my mother is a small grower. Over the years, I’ve sat down with her in the greenhouse to crunch the numbers, going over the profit/loss and balance sheets, how to finance another greenhouse, and how to grow a product that was different than what you find at super market. So how does a small grower make the cost structure work? This is a huge question in rural areas like my mother’s home in Prairie Farm, Wisconsin (population 443).
Wisconsin is where I spent a great deal of my childhood and it’s where much of my family lives today. For the most part it’s farm country with rolling hills of crops, big sprawling oak trees, and cows, many many cows. 1.25 million cows actually.
The biggest urban area in Wisconsin is Milwaukee (population 600,000) but Minneapolis and Chicago are right over the state’s borders. And little tiny Reedsburg is planted equidistant between these three cities - in a Bermuda Triangle of food production - about 3 hours from each city.
Donna explains: “Eighty percent of what any farmer grows goes to an urban consumer, and so urban people are involved in all the decisions made about how land is used in this country.”
Exactly two years after I first met Donna, now I’ve anchored my rolling recording studio here for the FarmArt DTour, a 100 mile loop through farm country. The whole event is part of Fermentation Fest with art installations in corn fields, performances in different habitats, and food stands offering a bevy of fermented goods like beer, cheese, and my new favorite “kickapoo kimchi”.
My mother rode along with me and together we asked over 50 visitors, vendors and growers, “What local food would you pay double for?”. The answers ranged across all five food groups and taught me that small boutique farmers can charge more than they think…
As Jay puts it in his essay, “The $9 Jar of Artisanal Pickles: Equity and Local Food”:
“Knowing the provenance of one’s food is a critical step in developing an appreciation and value for the work that goes into bringing it to the table. That food might be grown in one’s yard, simply prepared and shared with family, or it could be transformed into high-value artisanal products and sold.”
This episode looks at the questions of what makes food twice the price. When does food transcend a commodity and become something more to the customer?
DOCU-SHORT
PODCAST
DISCUSSION
There’s an art and a science to pricing. The science of pricing is a simple calculation of the costs involved and comparing it to other comparable products and services, and that establishes the “price floor”.
Q: What are all the costs to the floor of your price? How does this compare to your competitors?
Cultural products and services are not commodities. The ability to convey that difference comes through storytelling. The “ceiling” for your price is an art form and it’s all about storytelling. There’s no true limit to how much you can charge if you can effectively communicate the story behind the product to your ideal audience.
“I think you buy the $9 jar of pickles from your neighbor, that you know has integrity, and is proud of their product, and uses good quality ingredients, and cares very deeply about the process, and writes that handmade label, there’s a lot of care that goes in...”
Q: What can you say about your work to double the price? Triple?