We’ve been banging away at the Newton Indoor Farmers Market all season, so when we saw this outdoor event, we figured we’d jump on it. We’ve got 2 more weeks to go before the Newton Outdoor Farmers Market starts. We’ve been waiting all year to for this market to start up. It’s weird in that in starts in July, verses most farmers markets will start in June. The winter market never really caught on with the residents, but we know we’ll be doing fabulous once we get outside.

The Newton Highlands Village Day is basically a small street fair. The businesses within Newton Highlands could set up a table outside their store front and promote what they’ve got. They had a few kiddie rides and a smattering of different foods. It gave us a chance to see how many people recognized us from the winter market and how many remembered us from the tail end of last years outdoor market. We sold basically 4 gallons of corn oil, or 50 lbs of popcorn. Nothing to get excited about, but we’ve certainly gone through the trouble of setting up at other events, just to sell much less. We’re hoping after selling at the summer farmers market for an entire year, we’ll have many more customers and friends showing up at this event next year. The same thing happens at events at the Framingham Common. We’ve popped there at the farmers market for a few years, so when something like the Earth Day shows up, we always have plenty of friendly customers who remember us.

OK, so this wasn’t the FIRST day out product was there, but it was the first time *I* was able to come out and sell to the crowd. We’ve been selling our product at the Natick Indoor Winter Market for about a month. They recently started the Natick Outdoor Farmers Market last week, and Dan from the Easton Simpson Spring Beverages had our product on their table. I was able to hammer the crowd hard with our samples and I was able to sell twice as much.

So let’s see how we do WITHOUT our kettle! The Natick health department forbade us from popping live at this event, which is just as good because we’ve got other events we’re covering on Saturdays. The big concern is can we move product without the smell and noise that the kettle generates? As it stands now, we pop at my home location and drive the product and tent out to these new events. We’ll be doing the same at the Jamaica Plain Farmers Market in Boston in about a month. We’re also selling pre-popped kettle corn at the Easton Farmers Market on Saturdays too. That’ll be 3 events we’re covering without a kettle! The big experiment is can we continue to scale this type of thing of pre-popped product to other events? We can only pop live on some many days of the week.

Natick Farmers Market – Saturday 9-1 pm
Natick Common – Map: http://goo.gl/maps/3DAHX

We’ve done the Sudbury’s Save A Dog event at the Wayside Innf for a few years now and it’s always fun. The place is over run with poochies and since Dan and I are dog owners, we really have a fun time. The weather was perfect, the crowd came out and we did alright for event this size. I started to shoot a video which would’ve been only of dogs eating kettle corn, but got too busy to really make it unique. We’ll be back to this location in September when the Colonial Re-enactment people do their thing here.

Yay! We’re back out in the tent for the start of the 2013 season! This Earth Day event started only recently, I think last year was its first time. We were skeptical it would work so early in the season, but it’s been busy every year for us. It’s almost like everyone is dying to get out of the house from the winter and get a good dose of fresh air. This location is the same spot where the Framingham Farmers Market is located, so we have bunches of returning customers who are excited to re-ignite their kettle corn fix.

Apparently many towns are into this “Earth Day” type of event. We’re doing one in Jamaica Plain in Boston on May 4th and I know of a few others. They wanted us to use paper bags to serve our kettle corn in, but we balked at this big time – many people take their bags home and our product will be ruined by the time they would have eaten it. Yup, we’re just like those giant conglomerates: save the Earth? But what about our PROFITS? I think if we also sold booze and guns we could’ve covered all the politically incorrect bases. Buy your Velma’s Single Malt Whiskey and Velma’s AR-15 ammo here today!

In my search for winter farmers market, I had stumbled upon the Easton Indoor Farmers Market. What I didn’t realize is that there are plenty of OTHER farmers markets in a town called Easton, so I got all sorts of mixed signals when I went to “their” website. After figuring out I was looking at the Pennsylvania Easton Market (which was friggin’ HUGE), I finally got my story straight. They’re located inside the Simpson Spring bottling company. They sell all sorts of yummy flavors of sodas and bottled spring water. Apparently they are the oldest bottling plant in the country. The company started in the 1800′s and has changed hands many times over the years.

Dan noticed that Chris, the market manager and owner of the plant was very forthcoming when he contacted her. She immediately figured out that kettle corn and yummy sodas would make a good combination. She was very helpful in getting us into the market and helping us do the necessary paperwork with the town. The plant if really cool. It’s in an old mill building and has tons of space for everybody. We’re looking forward to doing business with these guys in the future.

Easton Indoor Farmers Market – 719 Washington St, South Easton, Massachusetts
Saturdays – 10-2 pm

Jackie Menino, the market manager from the Framingham summer market went nuts and started an indoor winter market. It’s located at 24 Vernon Street, Framingham, MA. First thursday of every month during winter. March 7, April 4, May 2nd 2013. What’s cool is Jackie found a few of the vendors from our Newton Farmers Market video. We though we weren’t going to be doing much popping over the winter, but we’ve found a who series of winter markets and we’re approaching them now.

We’ve recently had some press focused on us at the Newton Indoor Farmers Market. The big news is we got into The Boston Globe. You can read the whole article here.

Next we got a mention in the Newton Patch. Melanie said that she liked taking that silly photo of us beating each otehr with the product. You can read that one here.

Then Michelle, from the Economical Eater website had come by (upon my request) and checked out the market. She did a write up on us at her website. I had found her link at the Boston Food Bloggers website. There’s a crazy list of everybody here. Who knew there was was a whole “foodie” network of blog in and around Boston.

We’re dedicated to making the new Newton Indoor Farmers Market a success, if this place doesn’t work, nothing will. Newton is a very upscale town and is practically part of Boston, so there’s a crazy amount of people within walking distance to this market. We’ve never done an indoor farmers market so this is basically one giant experiment. Our biggest concern is if kettle corn sales would work if we didn’t have our kettle stinking up the neighborhood for miles. There’s also the entertainment factor of making the stuff, but since I’ve been using a cover with a motor to stir everything, that really isn’t much of a factor anymore. Starting a new market is always tough since you rely on habits forming with people’s schedules. An indoor market is really tough because it’s not as noticeable when you drive past it.

We’ve now done 3 weeks and it’s going better than I thought. We’ve been selling about 50 bags for the entire day, which isn’t much – seeing that we can do that in an hour at a busy location. The fact is people are buying it like they would any other produce item. It’s too bad we didn’t get a chance to create any hardcore addicts with our product at the summer market. We only had a chance to pop there for 4 weeks before it ended, people were only starting to form their habits. There’s only about 200 people showing up at the actual in door market, so we’re doing pretty good with our customers to sales ratio. We just need to promote this event and get people to come on down, thus this video was created. The hard part is finding websites that are specific to Newton that have people bothering to go to them. We did get a write up on the Newton Patch, a website that caters to specific local towns.

This is completely, totally new – the Newton Indoor Farmers Market. Indoor farmers markets are kind of a weird thing. Farmers typically don’t have a lot to sell during the winter, but the other vendors can certainly keep going. Plenty of people are still looking for the OTHER things like breads, meats, fish and sweet stuff (like ourselves). Since we can’t pop inside the venue, we’ve had to pop everything at my house first and bring the product down there. We’re very interested in seeing how this pans out, because it will be a lot like selling and moving product to stores. We also realize that the smell won’t be tormenting people when we pop, so will just the product itself get the same reaction?

Steve had tried bringing some pre-popped bags to the Springfield Indoor Farmers Market last year. It was only a once a month thing, so the turn out was as crazy as our regular season. Judy, the market manager at the Newton farmers market, wants to do this every week all the way up to June, when we’ll turn around and go straight back to the outdoor market. Our first day was kind of rainy and Judy said we had around 300 people who up (compared to 2,000 for a normal, busy outdoor Newton market). It will be interesting to see how many regulars from the outdoor market show up here. Here’s the info:

Newton Indoor Farmers Market
Tuesday – 1:30-6:00
90 Lincoln Street – Hyde Community Center
Newton Highlands, MA
November 13-June 18, 2013
Google map directions

Hanson’s Farm has been next to us at the Framingham Farmers Market for years. We noticed that they host a haunted hayride during October and we wanted to try and sell some kettle corn to their customers. It would be kind of a “mutual destruction” type of thing, hopefully we both would benefit. We also wanted to see the what the actual farm was like.

The video above basically explains what was going on. Dan and I were able to take the tour and got to experience the whole she-bang. It was fun. Both of us are from a film and lighting background, so we were designing all sorts of enhanced layouts of the ride and agreed it would be fun to work on something like this. There was a descent enough crowd that night and we sold an OK amount of kettle corn. There’s never a crazy amount of people here because the event takes place over the course of a few weeks, so it really wasn’t as lucrative as we hoped. We just did this one experiment of popping for the night and had a great time doing it.