We’re having an interesting experience with an alternative offer that we’ve been making to our members while the mobile market is on a 2-4 month hiatus.

In lieu or the mobile market we’re offering a bag of free produce on Fridays to our members, as well as an ongoing 25% sale on all inventory.

Lots of people have been coming on Fridays to get a bag of produce and buy food. While most initially come to just get a bag of free produce, almost all of them end up buying stuff from the warehouse.

The average sale is $20. So the free produce offer is acting as a driver for sales. Not sure what the long term viability of giving away produce is but, since we lose little from growing and giving away produce, we’ll probably keep doing this for a while until we clear out our inventory of packaged and bulk items.

I think free produce give aways is a very effective marketing and promotional tool for grassroots organizations trying to build a strong base of community members.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 17th, 2006 at 6:29 pm and is filed under People's Grocery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.