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June 13
Business, Business and More Business
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Today, duties around the farm took a backseat to the area of business development that had been in the works since the start of the pandemic. The reason the desire to break into the residential market came about is due to the closing of restaurants throughout the course of the pandemic. With restaurants being the staggering majority of the company's sales, adaptation was the only way to survive. Despite the fact that the company was successful at gaining some Boston residents who were interested in

purchasing product off of the website and receiving deliveries to their house, the size of their market was not the size that Oliver Homberg envisioned if he was going to really take on residential orders as a part of his business. The South Boston Farmer's Market was the best way to begin the process of expanding this target market. My co-intern, Maura, and myself spent the afternoon at the market gauging the interest of people who stopped at our table to speak with us about the business and our products. Although we were not selling any products, we had trays of basil, cilantro, radish and broccoli microgreens for people to taste. Additionally, I had perspective customers fill out the survey I had created so that we could better plan what products people would be interested in buying for the future. In all honesty, I was not entirely sure what level of interest we would receive. I am not sure if saying there is a stigma around microgreens is the best way to sum up how I think others feel, but I'm not sure how else to describe it. Many believe that microgreens are too fancy or aren't something that can be used in everyday life to obtain important vitamins and minerals. I think that has to be one of the biggest barriers that Homberg and the company face when trying to get more people outside of the restaurant industry to become customers. In order to break down this wall to the extent that we could, Maura and I brought out the live trays to the market to allow people to pick off of them and try the greens for themselves. In some ways I think you could say that working for the company even for a little makes me a bit biased, but I really feel that speaking with the two of us, touching and trying the greens really allowed people to bring their ideas of microgreens down to earth. Of the people who stopped to try them, all of them told us how good they were. Everyone had at least one out of the four varieties that they wanted to come back to purchase next week. The data collected from my survey demonstrated this to be fact. Each person who filled it out listed more than one green that they hoped to buy. 

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