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.
