Christina
Mehlhorn
June 10
Commonality Between Growing and Business
This Friday's harvest brought to my attention something that was important to both the growing aspect as well as the business aspect of Boston Microgreens: data collection. After last week's rather low cilantro yield, Homberg asked his employees, including myself, to write down the yield by weight of each tray harvested that morning. The team wanted to be able to pin down what is causing the low yields. In order to do so, they would need to manipulate different independent variables to examine how the dependent variable, the cilantro yield, changes. To more accurately know if the yield is changing or not, it is important to be recording the data of the dependent variable each time that cilantro is harvested during the week. Through this process, the team will be able to nail down exactly what is causing the low yields to change their procedure going forward. Next week during harvest if the yield increases, I plan on asking what they did or how they fixed the problem.
Additionally, data collection comes into play for successful business development and expansion. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic closing down restaurants for a period of time, Oliver Homberg decided he needed to adapt his business plan to include residential orders to stay afloat during the difficult time. Although he has continued to accept residential orders, its importance in the functionality of the business has shrunk significantly as a result of restaurants being completely back up and running as normal. He recently, however, wanted to revisit this part of his business but in a new way, through the South Boston Farmer's Market. In order to take on more clientele using his business model, which ensures that everything grown is already sold before even being harvested, the company needs to collect data that the new farm manager could look at in order to best plan the number of trays of each desired variety that needs to be seeded to fulfill the predicted order volume and that volume only. To help this process, I created a detailed customer survey that interested shoppers will fill out at our first few days having a booth at the market. This will record data including but not limited to what types of varieties they would be interested in purchasing and how frequently they would be purchasing. The data will be loaded into a spreadsheet and shared with the team to best create a plan of action to accommodate these orders in the limited space they have in the city. This data will allow the company to expand more into the residential market in a way that will guarantee success. I am excited to see if people are going to be interested in becoming customers of the company and purchasing microgreens on a regular basis.
