If you google High Ground Organics on your phone, your entire phone screen will fill with links to a website full of colorful pictures of vegetables and fruits, feel-good farm fresh organic language, and prominent sign up buttons. The problem? You’ll be signing up for Farm Fresh to You, a massive CSA-like creature that is gobbling its way to tens of thousands of customers’ doors per week.
A customer came to our farmstand manager Mike this weekend and said she signed up for our CSA online but the box came from Farm Fresh to You. She was confused and thought we must have some sort of partnership. No, we don’t.
You’ve probably seen the army of FFTY sales reps—on the street, at your door, coming up to you when you’re sitting on the beach, from San Francisco to L.A. They have an aggressive and effective marketing scheme. But this really goes too far.
It is possible to buy advertising that puts your information up in front of your “competitors” when a person googles key words, in this case “organic” or “csa.” I’ve been aware of this as a computer user. On the computer, I know that the top items that come up are paid-for ads and my eye automatically skips over them to the first non-paid item that comes up. But people are increasingly using their phones for these kinds of searches. And on the phone, it’s not so clear. This ad is designed to take up the entire screen, so High Ground Organics does not appear on my phone unless I scroll down. And while the first FFTY link indicates that it’s an ad, there’s a line between that and the $15 coupon below it which has four prominent links to How it Works, Why Choose Us, About Our Farm, and Customize Your Farm Box. If you scroll down and see High Ground Organics underneath that, you could be forgiven for thinking that those links belonged to us. What’s worse is that the name Farm Fresh to You sounds like it could be a slogan we might use, so people are understandably taken in by this and assume this is our farm, since they put OUR FULL FARM NAME into the browser.
This feels particularly upsetting because FFTY is at least 100 times our size. I will be looking into what it costs to block this sort of advertising from obscuring our online presence, but it doesn’t seem right to have to pay Google to do what it’s supposed to do when someone wants to find our business online using our precise name.
I’ve spent some time this week looking through the Farm Fresh to You website. It’s very nice. The 2nd generation farmer story is compelling. But the website does not make clear that FFTY is more of a produce delivery service than a true CSA. They talk a lot about “the farm,” but, in fact, they pick up produce by the truckload from other large growers. They talk about “local,” but get produce from all over the state, and maybe beyond.
I’m sure the ability to customize the box is compelling for would-be subscribers too. Who wouldn’t want to be able to replace something they don’t like with something they do? But there’s a big trade-off there. The only way to keep a variety of produce on hand for customers to have “choice” – and in order to send out the volume of deliveries that they do—is to maintain a large inventory.
When it comes to produce, inventory is the enemy of freshness. Vegetables start losing nutrients the moment they are picked. In fact, that is one of the main reasons people decide to join a CSA. If they wanted to simply choose their vegetables from a large inventory, they can go to a grocery store.
Are customers supporting small, local farms with FFTY? Well, some of the farms they buy from may be moderately sized. But FFTY no doubt takes a mark-up so those farmers are probably getting a wholesale price for their product. It may be helpful for those farms to sell their product to FFTY. But this is not the CSA model of direct to consumer sales, which gives the farmer and consumer both a fair price.
A behemoth that size simply cannot deliver what a CSA farm can: truly fresh locally grown organic produce. Unfortunately if they say it loud and often enough, many people will believe that it’s true. And when discerning consumers try FFTY and decide the quality isn’t that great, will they bother to try “another” CSA?
As always, we appreciate your support. And please remember, friends don’t let friends buy Farm Fresh to You.
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