Archives for May 2020

First off, an apology. If you have had any issues with strawberries recently, I am Sorry. Strawberries are one of my favorite fruits, but they are not easy to get to the middle of New Mexico looking good. We have a new grower coming online and I think the quality will be much stronger. Thanks for your patience. And as they say in the produce world, “When life gives you over-ripe strawberries, make strawberry lemonade.”

So that brings me to my next point this week, our Juice Bar. If you have been around our business for longer than the lifespan of a moth, you know that we try a lot of stuff in our business model. I have been accused of “shooting first, aiming second.” It might not be the best business approach, but when I get ex-cited about something, I like to launch a test balloon and then see how our customers dig it. If you like it, then we expand. If it flops, then we crumble it up and throw in the (ever-growing) compost heap of Manure Ideas.

So we started a juice test market in late 2019. The idea was keep it simple. No added water, flavors, or sugar. Just have fun with some juice and allow folks to not only eat their fruits & veggies but drink them too. We bought a small commercial juicer to give it a go. I loved the juice. Crazy thing is a lot of people loved the juice. Fresh, unpasteurized, Organic. And since we are getting the fruits/veggies directly from the farm, you will not find a better value anywhere in the country.

As the demand for these juices went nuts, we started to realize the limitations in our starter kit juice bar. So for the past few weeks we have limited our juices as we “tooled up” our juice barn. Our citrus juicer is still at the spa getting a makeover, but our new cold press juicer is online and squeezing to pleasing. Look for more juices and nectar online now.

Here is the full circle part of the strawberry story. Instead of cutting ties with the strawberry grower who kept sending over-ripe berries, we decided to cut tops instead. So we are still working with them but you will just see/taste their strawberries in our pies and juices and not as fresh strawberries in your order. And I am willing to bet that we are the only place in the state who offers freshly pressed straw-berry juice. Try them out this week. So good. And they will be gone when the strawberry harvest wraps up in a month.

Moving on from juices…Meal Kits. You know when you watch You Tube and see someone on a soar off the high dive only to do an insane belly-flop. It looks so painful, but you can’t help but laugh. I consider our Meal Kit expansion of 2020 kinda like that belly-flop; so painful, but you just can’t help but laugh.

Here is the quick backstory. We launched a small meal kit test at the same time we began the juice bar. Again testing the waters, sticking a toe in the deep end. It did well. Way better than expected. So we hired a chef, tripled the offerings, created an in-house kitchen space in our warehouse and were ready for the best.

Then the Corona craziness hit and our sales of Meal Kits exploded 1000% as folks were not going to restaurants. Sourcing product was hard, our chef left, and we could not fill all of the meal kits we had sold. Insert visual of a belly flop off Olympic plat-form. Ouch.

But we rubbed some Organic aloe vera on our burns and are back on the board. This time from the low dive. The 1-meter board… where hairy Norwegians are meant to jump from. So my goal for the meal kits (now) is the same as our juice bar; keep it simple, keep it fresh and tasty. Limited offering to begin with and the menu will expand as we streamline the process.

Other than that, everything else is looking great. All of our local suppliers have caught up to the new “norm” in the pandemic and are doing great. Thank you for supporting us and all of our New Mexican partner companies. We are staffed up and ready for whatever comes our way. Let’s open the state back up in a safe and thoughtful way. And as always, stay safe amigos.

Farmer Monte

New routes. We have added Belen, Los Lunas, and Ruidoso to the communities that we feed in New Mexico. Happy to have them on board and so if you know anyone in those areas who like to eat yummy foods, please share this with them. They will be so happy you turned them on to us, that they might send you an allergy-sensitive fruit cake for the holidays.

These new routes continue to help us reach our goal; I want our local food model to cover the entire state of New Mexico. I am unapologetic about my desire to give every New Mexican access to our food. Will they all choose us as an option? No. But our plan is to give New Mexicans better food choices. What you do with those choices is up to you. Yay free will.

Besides healthy food choices, expanding throughout NM strengthens our local food economy and adds diversity. The longer this pandemic grinds on, only the companies with the deep cash reserves will be able to stay in business. And small local businesses are not typically in cash rich reserve situations. So it is quite conceivable that we might see small businesses failing, leaving more faces of big national retailers.

Big retailers will survive (many of them, not all), but for me, the Mom n Pop businesses are what give our towns character. They are what make our towns unique. If you could go to the Frontier Restaurant in 5 states, then it would not be the gem it is for our state. It would be Applebee’s.

So aside from trying to feed more New Mexicans, I want to highlight more New Mexican companies. Give them a louder voice in the sense that a small shop can bring their goods to families throughout the state. What a Win-Win for NM. Thank you for supporting all our partners. Every bit of sup-port could mean the difference between keeping doors open or closed.

What else is happening this week??? Oh yes, insulated liners for our boxes. With the weather getting warmer, we had some custom insulated liners made for our cardboard boxes. I realize that many of our customers are home right now and bring the delivery inside as soon as our drivers are socially distant from your doorknob. But, if you are not home and want a little extra protection from the elements, I suggest adding these liners.

These liners are on our website now. If you would like your order packed using a liner, simply add 1 liner to your order and our thoughtful packers will see that and pack accordingly. We will Not be recycling these at the moment, but I en-courage you to hang on to the liners so that we can sanitize and reuse them after the covid craziness wanes.

Cherries. The cherries that we are highlighting this week were literally homeless. Some of them grew a pit on the out-side of the skin. Others grew 2 cherries around 1 pit. Some not shaped the way a cherry looks on the internet. All in all, a crazy looking bunch of cherries that taste amazing and just look different. Because of this, no store would take them. So we took on the (easy) task of finding homes for them. Your home! You will save money and help alleviate food waste. What a great combo.

This also reminds me of an article I read this week outlining how food costs have jumped more recently than over the last 5 decades! As I sipped my Organically roasted asphalt that I call coffee, I thought what a strange article because we are sheltered from that. Our food costs are the same (or lower) now than they were 2 months ago and even 2 years ago.

I point this out because it shows the importance of a local food supply. Local food is Food Security. When massive processing plants are shut down affecting millions of people, we are still secure by using our butcher, Mickey, in Moriarty. The same dude we have been working with for 15 years. And working with many of the same ranchers and growers as al-ways.

Again, local food is food security All of the time. But especially in times of uncertainty. We have a consistent and reliable food offering for you and your familia not because of what we have done in the last 2 months, but because of what we have built over the last 17 years. I cannot stress this notion enough.

The people who have been chasing the cheapest food are the most at risk and anxious right now. I want you to know we have you covered, relax, and be as healthy (and happy) as you can right now. Your family needs you healthy and so does our community.

Protect Yourself, Protect the Herd. Farmer Monte