Finding Opportunity to Build a "Farmers' Market on Wheels"
In this episode of the Direct Farm Podcast, we discuss full-time home delivery, local producer partnerships, and the importance of good customer relationships with Grant Sheeder of Sheeder Cloverleaf Dairy (IA).
Sheeder Cloverleaf Dairy is formerly a grass-based, family owned dairy operation located in Guthrie Center, IA that now currently specializes in full-time home delivery services and partnerships with other local vendors to offer a “farmers market on wheels”.
sheedercloverleafdairy.com
barn2door.com/resources
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Rory Loughran: Welcome to the Direct Farm Podcast. I'm Rory your host for today's episode. We've got a great conversation for you today with a member of our Farm Advisor Network, Grant Sheeder of Sheeder Cloverload Dairy located in Central Iowa.
Welcome Grant, it's great to have you here. It's been a little while since we've had you on the podcast.
Grant Sheeder: Hey Rory, how's it going?
Rory Loughran: Good. Good. So to start, could you kind of catch us up or give us a little bit of a refresher on the history of your Farm business?
Grant Sheeder: Yeah. So my family, we started using Barn2Door back in 2020 when COVID hit and our dairy that we milk cows on and [00:01:00] bottle in glass bottles were having issues receiving our bottles back at the grocery stores. The grocery stores would not take the bottle deposits back for us to wash, reuse, and get back on the shelfs.
One of our employees reached out to me with an idea of someone out in New York that was doing home delivery. And it all kind of really happened fast as far as, actually someone at Barn2Door had reached out to me that same week. It was kind of a perfect storm for us to transform what we had was just going directly to grocery stores and restaurants to offering a home delivery service to the same area.
Just mainly so we could hopefully get our bottles back and then obviously give that more of a hands on feel, direct to consumer experience. It's kind of kinda how we got started with our home delivery service and Barn2Door.
Rory Loughran: Yeah. And well, and your family had been doing dairy for some time before that as well, too, correct?
Grant Sheeder: Yep. So we started milking cows in 1996, and then we started bottling on our Farm in 2006 and glass return rebuttals. We did, we, all of our milk was that we produced or all the milk that we sold was produced there on our Farm. And then [00:02:00] any excess milk that we were able to use in our ice cream mix or eggnog within season or just fluid milk, we would sell to a co-op outside of that.
So it wasn't like we'd had to have a certain amount of cows milking at one time or not be able to generate some cash flow from that excess milk as well.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, awesome. Well, So then, yeah, like you said you guys started offering delivery and doing online sales back in 2020 now and so COVID was kind of the big reason for making that initial leap, kinda?
Grant Sheeder: It was the reason. I mean, the connection with the customer was just an added bonus, but the main reason was we needed bottles in the worst way. I was going down every Saturday in a mall parking lot and having customers bring us bottles and hand them cash in return just so we could keep 'em in rotation. Transportation was a bigger issue at this point as well. Getting our bottles, we got some bottles without our labels on 'em. I mean, it took a while for them to print that on the side.
It was just something that we did not anticipate, I guess, whatsoever, like anybody, I guess. And, It was always a 8 to 12 week timeframe to get our bottles, [00:03:00] and it was just so long out to get bottles with our label put on 'em. So, the best thing was, is trying to go direct to the consumer to at least help connect with them. I mean, get those bottles back in our house. So we can, like I said, wash sanitize and get 'em refilled back to the customer.
Rory Loughran: Yeah. I'm sure there's a lot added benefit, especially even just if you're selling direct, you're controlling that communication and maybe even expectation setting around getting those bottles back. So that makes a huge difference.
Grant Sheeder: A hundred percent and we've been in the market, like I said, since 2006. We've had a Facebook page, we've been able to communicate with our customers over the course of this time, our time, and they understood. I mean, it was one of those unprecedented events unfortunately that we all were dealing with.
I guess another plus outta that, there's a lot of people that did not wanna go to the grocery store at the time either. So, that's where even the grocery stores, they adapted where they did a lot of in store shopping for customers and just customer pickup and I think they still do that to some degree.
But yeah, and we were able to partner with other local producers that, I mean, there weren't Farmer's Markets that summer. There's just a [00:04:00] lot of avenues for local producers that were taken away that was their livelihood. And luckily we were able to tap into that and help them, help us, help the consumer. This kind of a win, win, win for everybody, for us to be able to partner with those other local producers, whether it be for coffee or eggs, meat.
We've got a slew of different products from local producers from the area. So it was a huge bonus for all of us. A Farmer's Market on wheels, if you will.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, definitely. That was the start of your delivery program. Had you ever thought about doing delivery before all that?
Grant Sheeder: It was something that was always in the back of my mind for another avenue to go down, but fast forward to today, we don't even milk cows now just cuz there's, unfortunately, there's not enough staff in our area.
I mean it's a different line of work, I mean, milking cows and taking care of animals on a daily basis. It's not hard work, but it's always there. And we always say that having milk cows is kinda like raising kids cuz you know when their bad days are and when they don't feel well and you have that sense about [00:05:00] them when you see 'em every day, twice a day, if not more.
And it's hard to get somebody externally to come in and have that same connection with the animals and to be able to keep their welfare at utmost as well for, not only for production purposes, but for the animal wellbeing as well.
But yeah, it's doing the home delivery part of it. I thought it would be tough to just market our milk alone. So the first two connections I made were a local egg producer and a local bread producer that they do all the stuff in house with no added hormones or antibiotics and any of that sort of stuff.
And it's kind of blossomed into these other items that we have where we have, I mean, a firewood frozen pizza supplier, pies, jams, pasta noodles made here in Iowa. We've got a coffee beef, pork. We're slowly getting into the produce kinda, sorta. We are working with a producer hopefully here soon that with some hydroponics that'll have some year round.
But yeah, you have to stay open-minded and for us it's what works logistically as well. There's some things we'd love to have on board, but it's just logistically doesn't make sense for us to try to make it work for either [00:06:00] for us or the producer if we're not that scale, I guess yet.
Rory Loughran: Yeah. Well, I know like, so you start out the delivery program and as you've talked about, you've kind of added a lot of products to that. But how is delivery in terms of the scale of the program with how many deliveries you guys are doing? How has that growth been over the past couple of years?
Grant Sheeder: It's been steadily increasing. Every season's a little bit different. Summer months, especially this summer, we've noticed mainly from our subscription buyers, they've been on a lot of family vacations making up for lost time, or a lot of the kids are in sports, so they're not around as much, or they're gone more, being more active in that aspect of it.
And a lot of our older customers they're off visiting their kids, their grandkids in other locations too. So everyone's kinda making up for 2020 and part of 2021 for being home ridden to getting out and about, and seeing a lot of family that they hadn't when been able to see for a year plus.
We're always adding more customers. We're kinda, we're busy in the summertime too here, so I'll admit that I'm not the [00:07:00] most marketing savvy person, I guess. I lean a lot on social media and our MailChimp as well, but I know whenever I do it, we see the dividend pays off using that MailChimp and just a little bit of social media to connect and just a general reminder is, "Hey, don't forget about us and these different products, whatever it may be." Cuz some people forget that, "Hey, I forget you have pies or I forget you have, I mean, honey and stuff like that." There's just all those things where just a general reminder, I mean, a simple click of a button, send out some emails, really pays off.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, definitely. That's a great way of putting it too, is just keep reminding people that you're around, that you're there, that you have maybe more products than people even think. So I'm curious, like for Farmers, since you have been doing delivery now for a while, and you guys have really scaled that program, what would be your advice to maybe a Farmer who's just getting started with deliveries, or maybe some things they could avoid that maybe were problems that you ran into?
Grant Sheeder: I guess one of the things, besides investing into the Barn2Door subscription and working with all the fine staff there. We bought a van, brand new van, [00:08:00] and that was one of those things that, hey, if this doesn't work after six months, the market for these refrigerated vans are through the roof.
So, at least we can get our money back outta that deal type of thing. But the logistics is a huge part of making it all click. I mean, with efficiency and fuel costs and everything, it all matters. But for us, I guess it was just growing it small because we were doing two days for quite a long time, and now we're up to four days with a lot more zip codes added to it. So we didn't wanna bite off more than we could chew, more or less.
And just kind of grow small would be the best advice, cuz unless you have the people power to be able to provide that service to a large area and things take off, the worst thing's gonna happen is that customer being upset that you said it was gonna be here at this time or this day, and you don't have the people, power, or the inventory to make that happen. I had, I'd seen that through some other people that grew too big, too fast and it was something I wanted to avoid at all costs.
We could have probably gotten faster and bigger. But I kinda like those baby steps.
I [00:09:00] mean, we would always have those customers like, "oh, we're just right across the zip code line." And obviously I wish I could go there cause we're all trying to make a living here, but yeah, it just takes time to do some of that stuff. I mean, it was a year and a half before we got to the point where we are today in our delivery area.
Rory Loughran: Wow. Yeah. I think that's a great point. And I think a lot of the most successful Farms that are doing well with delivery, they say the same thing.
Grant Sheeder: It's kind of an acclimation, not only for us putting everything together as fresh as possible to get into their door step. But it's kind of a learning curve for the customers as well to get on board and understand the website and what to find, subscription or not, and just the delivery process.
I mean, again, you don't wanna bite off more than you can chew, cuz I was on my phone enough the way it was just trying to respond and stay ahead of any questions and it was nothing bad.
It was just they didn't understand something. So they had a question, it was just a simple need to do this or provided them with a link or adjusting the delivery day or whatever it may be, but it all takes time. And that's where that customer service level, you wanna stay at the utmost importance along with the quality product, obviously, but that was something that was [00:10:00] near and dear to me is keeping people happy as much as we could anyways and I've been pretty successful at keeping them happy. So, We're pretty like fortunate with our market too. I think in today's world, I guess one of the things that it's taught us is patience.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, no, I think that's always the two things you mentioned there: maintaining quality and maintaining that personal relationship. Cuz I think at the end of the day, that's really what your customers, their two highest priorities probably boiled down to is having a relationship with their Farmer and getting that quality product. So, I think you saying like those are the two things we had to maintain through delivery is that's really important.
Grant Sheeder: Yeah, cuz there's no question the products that we sell cost more than they would at the grocery store. And that's because it's better quality stuff. It's the freshest you can get and these people aren't afraid to pay that price. I mean, A to support local Farmers and B it's the best of the best.
It is what it is and it's not some large factory and I'm not knocking the big factories. We gotta have 'em too, but yeah, people know what they're getting and they deserve the best when they're paying that premium price for it and part of getting that is the [00:11:00] relationship you have when they have a question or concern or whatever it may be, having that open line, whether it be through social media or through email or phone call.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, definitely. Well, you talked about some of those partnerships that you've established, and I know that a lot of your business is built around these partnerships. Now I was curious, cuz I know this is something that other Farms are interested in too. They wanna increase that product offering that they have on their store without necessarily having to bring on a bunch of a whole bunch of other animals to start raising or start growing all these different produce options.
So they look to do that through partnerships. How has that kind of happened for you? Have those kind of come to you naturally and people wanting to partner with you, or have you gone about looking for people and reaching out to them? How has all that kind of transpired over the last couple years?
Grant Sheeder: A little bit of both. There's some that I just, I mean, come across my news feed or that I look for a specific type of item that's locally produced and I'd reach out to. But a lot of them yeah, had reached out to us through our social media as well. Just cuz we were spending money and we [00:12:00] were getting our message across to people in the area saying, "Hey, this is the best of the best home delivery."
Like I said, the Farmer's Market on wheels, if you will. And a little bit of both and we had to be careful what we brought on board. People just knowing people in the market as far as their products go and, yeah, us searching for a little bit. We're always looking for some new things to add and some of it, like I said, has come down to logistics, unfortunately that we can't make it happen at the moment, but we keep that line open for down the road if they get a little closer to the area that we can make that work and make it affordable for both of us to do.
Cuz I said it comes down to we still gotta make some money in the process. As much as we wanna have everything available, we still gotta be able to make ends meet.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, definitely. I was curious what have some of the outcomes been of having all these different products in your store? Like have you seen a pretty direct correlation between like average order sizes or anything like that kind of increasing as you've added more products?
Grant Sheeder: Yep. Yeah. Oh, for sure. And again, it kind of goes on a seasonal basis on some things. The honey, the breads, pies, obviously in the falltime and the wintertime. We have a lot more [00:13:00] pies that go out with ice cream and the thing that we like to pair things with, I mean, we have pizza.
One thing that I found out one time in my ventures was they offered hot honey on their pizza at a local restaurant in the Des Moines market and I had never even thought of something like that. So I promoted that through our MailChimp deal and we had so much hot honey and pizzas go out.
It was just little things like that, you just try to help come up with ideas and dinner plans and stuff like that, that makes life easier for our customer. And that really bodes well for us to like at least help make that association with these different products throughout the seasons.
Rory Loughran: No, that's an awesome idea. I love that like, put together the whole meal for the person in an email. That's a great idea.
Grant Sheeder: Yep. I mean, it's not for everybody, but I mean, sometimes it's just, some people are like, "oh, that sounds good. I've never thought of that." And I know that's, for me, I was a woodfire pizza at a different location. And I was like, "wow, this is like really good." And our honey provider happened to have small honey.
So I made that push and we've done that with like our granola and yogurt [00:14:00] before. Paired it well with ice cream and cookies or pies and cookies. Just a lot of different things that we try to associate or pair it together to help promote within, so...
Rory Loughran: Yeah. Do you guys, do you do like a promo around it or do you just pair the products and people buy it?
Grant Sheeder: yeah, we just push it. We don't necessarily do a promo just cuz there's so many different flavors. It's just lot easier for the customer to pick and choose which they like and just inform them of the idea more than anything. Cuz otherwise it'd just be lot inventory issues that I don't wanna deal with.
Rory Loughran: Well, And I think too, like if you don't need the promo, don't use it.
Grant Sheeder: Again, it's just, I mean, if we had more people on staff and here soon we will, but it comes down to time and energy too. And the customers, I think it just kinda gives them the ability to get what they want and how many they want, too. Cuz everyone's a little different. So this way we also don't dictate, like, what they can and can't have.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, no, that's awesome. As you alluded to there at the beginning a few months ago now, your business and your Farm underwent some pretty big changes. So I was wondering if you could maybe start by just explaining what that was and what kind of went into that [00:15:00] decision.
Grant Sheeder: Yeah, mainly my dad's wellbeing. He's 64 now. Just a lot of years of wear and tear on his body that he didn't take the time to go get fixed. Well, I guess he says that he couldn't cuz we were all working full time and it's tough to get away from the cows and everything we had going on at the Farm and heal properly.
And there was some truth to that, but yeah it's still one of those things that you gotta take care of yourself before anything else or otherwise you don't have anything, type of thing. I guess mom and dad made the decision to sell the milk cows so he can get the help he needs as far as, he's had a knee replacement with another one coming up here and a shoulder surgery, a hip replacement. Just a lot of years of not taking care of himself properly led to the decision to make that happen.
So, sold the milk cows in February, sold a lot of our equipment and all of our processing equipment to several other local producers all across the US. We were pretty, pretty fortunate to find some people that were in need of our type of or our size of equipment and find [00:16:00] homes for.
So we've transitioned from having a dairy herd to about 90 head of stock cows and calves down too. So we're still utilizing the ground that mom and dad have, with rotational grazing for our beef cows along with growing some crops. And so since then, we've been able to partner with another dairy out in Nebraska that bottle their milk in glass bottles to offer to our customers.
We still have glass bottled milk that we provide. Ours was grass based in this other facility, they're not. So that's the biggest difference from what our quality of milk is or different taste, I guess you could say.
And I've grown up on it for 20 some years. I've been doing it since I was second grade. I had to stand on buckets to get up there and milk cows from the pit and to go from that to not milking cows every day it's definitely been a very... oh, it's a weird feeling, I guess. I mean, if we still have livestock that's good cuz it's an important part of our lives.
So since then, with our home delivery, and fast forward a little bit, I can never keep USDA [00:17:00] inspected beef products is my biggest thing. We can't keep enough steaks or roast and that sort of stuff in stock.
And so I did some homework. I reached out to an old locker owner and did a bunch of homework as far as how and where, what it'd take to get a locker built. And I think it was two years this last May, I met with somebody and from that time forward, I guess we're to the point we're about 30 days away from opening our locker here in Guthrie Center.
Did a lot of homework, did a lot of research. I got a partner involved with me on this to bring USDA inspected facility to our little town where we'll be able to process up to 30 beef a week. So I've transitioned kind of myself from the dairy side to providing a locker for locals and for our retail purposes, not only for our home deliveries, but for restaurants and stuff like that, too, in an area that seems to be a giant gap in right now.
Rory Loughran: Yeah. No, definitely. And I think that it compliments your delivery service so [00:18:00] well too, that kind of moving into that different space. Obviously a huge change for you, like you said, and especially with dairy, cuz dairy's just such a nonstop go, go.
Grant Sheeder: It is. Yeah.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, that's really exciting.
Grant Sheeder: I didn't have any intentions of working here initially, but with mom and dad's decision at the end of January to make that step, I've gone from helping bring the idea together and financially, kinda make all ends meet there with my partner, to now I'll be helping run the show there for a while, so...
And that's where my dad he's kind of fit in the stock cow side of things. He's got some different lines of cattle that we'll be able to do some pasture fed along with corn fed along with other producers in the area that will have available for our retail work.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, awesome. So it'll be kind of a mix combo of the processing business, as well as this kind of aggregation model through your delivery service?
Grant Sheeder: Yeah. Yeah, and then some, I think. We've built it to grow into, I guess, in a sense and we've been anticipating this day for long. We've been waiting on [00:19:00] cooler and freezer evaporators and condensers. Those darn little chips everyone wants in their vehicles, are in the motors for our system as well.
So, we're down to the wire to get in all that stuff installed at the moment. Yeah, with our home delivery, along with our retail, with like different grocery stores, restaurants, and then we'll be able to implement some of this with Farmers Markets in the area too. There's other producers in the area that'll have their label on their products that we'll be able to help them get slots filled cuz in our area, very livestock oriented area, we're getting a date to get your animal butchered.
It's two years plus out for a lot of people. So it's really hard to schedule and I had to make a living off of guessing two years out on things. We're looking forward to being able to bring this to the area.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, no, that's gonna be huge. I mean, we talk to Farmers every day who just can't get processing dates or they're having to book processing dates before the animals are even alive. And a huge headache for everybody right now. I know.
Grant Sheeder: So yeah. Went from one headache to the next, but I'm looking forward to it. It's [00:20:00] not gonna be quite the time restraints I had with the milk and the cows, but there's parts of the milk and cows. I do miss being outside more and there's part of me that misses it, but there's a part of me that I don't miss either.
Rory Loughran: Yeah.
Grant Sheeder: Two little ones and my wife's job and everything like that. It has allowed me to enjoy a lot more things that I hadn't before, but I guess you don't know, you don't miss it, I guess either also, but...
Rory Loughran: Yeah, no, definitely. So I was kind of curious, do you think any of this would've or some of this would've even been possible if you hadn't have started down that direct to market path? So two years ago now and doing home delivery and things like that, do you think those kind of initial steps or would've led to this being an option for you?
Grant Sheeder: Not at all. I don't think so at all. very unlikely, I should say. I always knew of the need for, especially for the locker, the locker is one of those things where I knew there was a need for it, but to the point where, the driving factor for me was for my pocketbook.
I mean, I'm not able to get it and if I could provide a service to a large group of [00:21:00] customers to do their own custom work or their own retail work along with satisfying my needs for the home delivery side of things and kind cut out the middleman to say, pass on those savings to the customers.
We're gonna be bringing 12 to 15 jobs to town. We've got a lot of good equipment coming to town to help mitigate some of the staffing issues a lot of us face, but this type of work is something that people don't mind as much as the milk and the cows things when you're standing at a barn, a hundred degrees and fans blowing and flies chewing on you and cows pooping on you, that sort of stuff. It is just a whole different line of work that I think people are more immune to, and don't mind doing nearly as much as some of the fiscal aspects of it a lot of farmers are unfortunately having issues, finding people to work.
And to the point we are with this facility today, hadn't it been for Barn2Door and help making all this kind of this home delivery thing come to fruition.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, that's awesome to hear. I think another thing that you've kind of mentioned and talking about like switching milk producers and adding all these other customers or other partners, I guess, to offer all these [00:22:00] different products to your customers, is having that really strong and loyal customer base who trust you enough to almost pick these items for 'em. And so I was wondering if you could speak to that and how you've gone about developing that over the years of building that customer base.
Grant Sheeder: Just being transparent with them. I mean, I ask them questions on social media. I don't know everything and I'm not gonna act like it either. So, If there's something out there or something they would like to see changed or adapted to or whatever it may be, I just put it out there and ask 'em on Facebook and, or email, either way. And just kinda get their feedback on things and how we can make things better or offer things that are something that they would like or what they think to see changed or whatever it may be. And I tell you, we got the best customers in the world. They respond so well and without attitude.
So yeah, it goes back to where just having that personal relationship with them, they see me and my family on social media. I try to share pictures once in a while, so they can put a name to the face a little bit too.
So they have that connection as well. But yeah, I think having that [00:23:00] connection really helps the overall growth, cuz when they're sitting around talking to the neighbors or family or whatever may be, if they're within our delivery service area they're able to get online and check it out and get some of those products.
And some of 'em, like I said, they'll reach out to me and, "Hey, what have you ever thought about doing this or is some of the products we have in different sizes?" It's just a lot of these little things and sometimes I say, yeah, we can make that adjustment. Or sometimes ah, we just simply can't do that.
And they understand that too. Having a, I guess, it's a pretty open relationship with our customers, or kinda let them determine some degree as long as it's, I mean, fits within our means and budget to do things.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, no, and that's awesome that they know they can communicate with their Farmer and with the person who's getting them their food. That's really cool.
Grant Sheeder: Yeah, it helps immensely. And the partners we work with too, they do a good job of interacting with the customers, cuz they don't always come to us for the questions either. Cuz again, I'll be the last person to tell you I know everything, so. So when they go and they reach out to these partners that we work with, those Farmers and families appreciate it too, knowing that [00:24:00] they're being appreciated. We're just fortunate enough to have the service to get it there.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, no that's really cool. Well, So you've been, I think you said this kind of all started, at least you got the ball rolling back in about February, I think. You spoke to some of the challenges with just supply chain and things moving slow in terms of the meat locker, but in terms of that delivery program, the shift you do in beef more so and growing out the kind of aggregation model. How has that all progressed so far?
Grant Sheeder: Slow.
Rory Loughran: Yeah.
Grant Sheeder: And really it's just mainly because, I mean, just transportation of goods has been our biggest thing. And it's hard to promote, like in our meat locker, we're gonna have so many different fresh meat items offer pasture fed. We'll have more types. We'll have a local elk producer, we have lamb, we'll have obviously the pork and the beef.
We just got so many more things that we're gonna partner with and do. A lot of ready to eat meals, where we'll have the roast with, potatoes from local Farmers and onions and that sort of stuff in a bag where essentially when you get it home, you [00:25:00] cut the top off, put it in your crockpot and hit warm.
But we've only scratched the surface, I think, with this home delivery thing, as far as having somewhat of a Farm fresh, ready to eat meals. Luckily with the meat locker, we've got some equipment that we'll have there that we can really do some partnering with different items that we haven't even touched base. Like the produce side of things, it's hard to preserve some of that stuff where some of the shrink wrap stuff that we'll be able to do we'll be able to package things better so they can stay fresh, longer, in house. And then we'll have a retail space within our meat locker too, so we can offer more things, knowing that if we don't have it available through home delivery, we can sell out the front door and have a decent, fresh product without having a bunch of inventory worrying about throw it away.
To answer your question, yeah. It's been slow, but we're looking forward to really ramping things up here in the next 30 to 45 days to really do a lot of testing as far as what the market wants.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, no that'll be a fun process too. And getting that, like you said, your customer feedback is such a big part.
Grant Sheeder: Yeah. And won't be able to offer quarters and halves of beefs or porks or [00:26:00] whatever may be. When you pencil it out, if a customer has a space with a deep freeze or just a fridge freezer, whatever, it might be. Buying those quarters and stuff like that, you're so much money ahead than you are going to a grocery store, even through us just buying steaks only type of thing. If you get that quarter you pay for the pound. It's not necessarily the cut. So having that ability to all of our customers, I think will be a good thing for everybody.
Rory Loughran: I know subscriptions were also something that was pretty crucial to you when you were doing dairy and, people are getting milk every week or so. And so have you been able to transition that or are you looking to transition? Obviously you're still selling milk, so I'm sure you'll still do subscriptions there. But has your approach to subscriptions or how you're using those kind of changed as you've shifted your business model a little bit?
Grant Sheeder: Little bit. We still do subscriptions for the glass bottled milk that we have. Before we were able to dictate the prices ourselves. And I don't think we ever changed the price of the milk in the year and a half that we were on Barn2Door. So, I mean, there's that to take into consideration.
So we do it on [00:27:00] a, oh, it's a two month timeframe for subscriptions. Which it works out well that way cause it's eight weeks of not having to worry about people, not knowing if they got milk cone or not. But after that I got spoiled for the first year and a half cause it never changed and it was just an ongoing subscription.
Whereas now I had to keep track of that stuff, which I mean, it's not the end of the world, but not knowing what the market's gonna be in the price of product and or transportation, all those different stuff had to take that into effect. So we do our eggs and our milk two months time basis, and then revisit things with our Farmers and kinda forecast if they think they see an increase coming or even a decrease, if whatever it may be, so we can adjust for at least for the eight week time period.
Rory Loughran: Yeah.
Grant Sheeder: But definitely subscriptions are the way to go for a lot of customers. They love it. I wish I could do more things on subscription, but just cuz of inventory issues, it's tough to do that and many more things other than our milk and eggs until we get our own locker go up and going in here and then we'll be able to have lot [00:28:00] more meat products available through subscription if need be.
Rory Loughran: Are there any kind of ideas already cooking there for what you might wanna do for around those meat products for subscriptions?
Grant Sheeder: Yeah, we do. It's just again, it'll be seasonal cuz there's a lot of different cuts that, I mean, are more popular in the winter months in the fall months than as opposed to, I mean, like hamburger patties or whatever it may be for grilling season in the summer months.
It'll be more like hamburger, that sort of stuff, buying a bulk that they can do. We'll be able to help offer savings on that sort of stuff that. Yeah, like I said, it'll be again, probably like a two month time period or give or take 15 days here and there. But that's the timeframe that we probably will do at least, again, it's gonna be a new thing for us to learn and it'll probably change on an annual basis as well.
So have to keep that, again, the transparency open with the customers and see what they want.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, yeah. Well, and like that, like a roast meal that you were talking about where you just have everything put together at once, I feel like that pairs really nicely with subscriptions too. You could sign up for a subscription and get [00:29:00] two or three of those or something like that.
Obviously not all the same thing, but you get your dinners for the week and you're set.
Grant Sheeder: Yeah. And that's where even we've got a local cafe here in town that that she's gonna provide a lot of our pasta noodles or pasta salads and desserts. That sort of stuff that we'll have fresh in our fresh deli area and our retail space that it's gonna be a pretty unique package where you can literally get your vegetable, potatoes, and meat all in one.
They'll be individually wrapped within one package where you just slice open, heat up, and you're ready to feed a family of four. We will have different sizes, feed different sized families. So, kind of benefits another local producer or family owned business here in town, along with just being able to feed their family is affordable and easy.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, no, that's awesome. And it's all, yeah, like you're saying local products. For a Farmer who wants to work with an aggregator, somebody kind of selling their products for 'em like yourself, what would be your advice to them kind of going about establishing that relationship and what are some things that you've learned make it easier to [00:30:00] do that, I guess?
Grant Sheeder: Transparency. I know everyone thinks they've got the best stuff in the world and I mean, if they wanna sell, sell. I guess just keep an open mind too, cuz we get a new product. Every time we sell a boatload of that new product off the bat and then it scales back a little for a little while.
And then they wonder what they did wrong or something like that. And it's just a trend that we see in every new item that we ever have bring on board or try to push. It's just, it's tough to push everything all the time and our vendors that we work with now understand that there for a while they were confused. Some of 'em would be confused why it would be so hot and then not. Our customer base isn't always the same clientele as they have coming in their doors or their Farms.
So, It's just a different environment to not get discouraged I guess or feel that something's wrong or something like that. And definitely if there's any assistance that you as a Farmer could provide someone like myself with any information or just providing the customers with as much information about the products as possible.
So yeah, I mean, all that [00:31:00] it's a community effort, as far as that goes, as far as the marketing, the connection, transparency, the information, providing the customers along with keeping the quality product the way it is. I remember one time we actually had to buy some silage before we got our fresh silage packaged or we put it in these big tubes. So we had to buy some from a different Farmer around that he didn't seal it the way we do. So the silo smelled different. It looked different. It was just all around different. The milk, our milk tasted different as well. So you are what you eat literally. And our cows are no different.
And one of our coffee purveyors, she couldn't get it to froth the way she wanted and she didn't understand why. And so we were like freaking out. Something, there's something growing in the pipes or something. so we literally spent an entire weekend tearing everything apart in our processing facility to see if there's any, anything growing somewhere that would give this different flavor to it or why it wouldn't froth or whatever it may be. Cuz we hadn't changed anything else as far as our practices or the pasture or anything like that.
And we couldn't find anything [00:32:00] and it come down to the time period where it wouldn't froth and had that different taste was the exact same time period where we had that silage that we had purchased through different Farmer. Which it was still okay. The cows enjoyed it, it was good, but it was just a totally different quality. It was a year old. It wasn't the top of the notch, but we just had to get enough to get by for a week until we got our fresh stuff.
Once we realized that, we told our customers and I mean, they were so happy to hear that. I mean, Cuz we had a lot of customers like "yeah, we tasted a difference too." Or I remember one customer, like he mentioned his daughter's name to his wife on a Facebook post and said her name and said she wasn't crazy. I mean, she wasn't pulling our leg. I mean, there wasn't a different taste to it.
Having that personal relationship with the customer, just kinda letting them know, we're all human. The cows are no different really in that respect, in this case. Things change throughout the year. There's so many different things that can change, not only the delivery time, but the quality of things sometimes that are out of our hands, I guess. And it's best to get [00:33:00] across or if there's something really good that happens.
I mean, same thing is to let the customers know exactly what's going on or whatever it may be, cuz they're gonna be just as happy for you as we are, type of thing. So, it kind of has that feeling where people are really pulling for you and the vendors that we work with. So it helps a lot just keeping that open communication.
Rory Loughran: Yeah, no, definitely. That goes a really long ways. I guess just looking ahead as a final question Grant, what's kind of next? I know you've talked about the next 30, 45 days are gonna be pretty, sound like they're gonna be pretty busy for you. So what's kind of next step ahead for you in the business?
Grant Sheeder: Besides the meat locker, we'll be partnering with a lot of other, hopefully different products as far as some produce and cheeses. Oh, There's just, I got a long list of things that people are wanting to do things it's just...
Rory Loughran: I don't want to stress you out.
Grant Sheeder: It's just, I wish we could offer everything all the time.
It's just, we haven't had the inventory space to do that until we get our locker up and going. We designed it so we could accommodate more local family produced items not only for in store that we'll have in our meat locker, but also definitely through our home delivery service.
So people will be able to have more of a [00:34:00] variety of things and I mean, more varieties of the same things as well. So it could be another pie producer or a honey producer, something like that. We're not biased just to one family or Farm. We can open it up to more down the road here. So, inventory wise, hadn't had a lot of space to, to really do much growth as far as some of those products go, so...
Rory Loughran: Yeah. I'm excited to hear how everything keeps going and keeping an eye on you guys. I love keeping tabs on your website and your Facebook and all that. So it'll be cool to see.
Well, awesome. Grant, thanks for joining us on the podcast.
Grant Sheeder: Yeah. Hey, thanks for having me again.
Rory Loughran: I want to extend my thanks to Grant for joining us on this week's podcast episode. Here at Barn2Door, we're humbled to support thousands of Farms across the country, including Farms like Sheeter Cloverleaf Dairy. We're honored to get the opportunity to learn from our most successful Farmers who share these tactics, resources, and tools that they've used to grow and manage their Farm businesses.
If you would like to connect with these Farmers and other Farm Advisors, attend Barn2Door Connect. You can register for weekly sessions at [00:35:00] barn2door.com/connect. For more information on Sheeter Cloverleaf Dairy, you can follow them on Facebook at Sheeter Cloverleaf Dairy.
Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time.