Research, research and more research

I decided I needed to do some first hand research. I was learning loads of stuff from the web, but reading and seeing first hand are two different animals. I needed to go into town to buy groceries anyway, so I decided to go on Sunday - the day of the Hillcrest Farmers' Market.

My mission was to observe, take notes and learn as much as possible.

One of the things I learned from reading on the web was the ridiculously long detailed list of government regulations that were required in order to prepare and sell food. In order to comply with this list I was looking at probably a $50-$60,000 investment. Remember the part about me being on food stamps? Believing what I had read to be correct, I wasn't really going there to take notes on this part. But it ended up being the subject of one of the most profound things I learned from the trip.

I planned on taking 2 surveys. The first was to ask people a short list of questions about eating and buying habits regarding vegetarian and vegan prepared food at farmers' markets. I made a survey sheet and printed myself a bunch of copies. When I got to the market and started asking people to participate, I didn't get much cooperation. In fact, none. It didn't 'feel' right either. So I stopped.

The second survey I planned didn't involve talking to anyone. The plan was to go around the market, make a list of several food booths and take notes as to how many customers each one had at regular intervals. I did my rounds every 15 min. Anyway, the short version of this story is, the majority of the booths had at least 1-2 people buying on every round. Usually more, about 3-5 on average. This means that most booths were busy the majority of the day and served as many people as they were capable of. Be it one customer per minute or one customer every two minutes, depending on what was served and how fast they could serve. But there was only one vegan booth serving meal type items. The good news here is they were above average in regards to customer traffic. The food I will be serving, in my opinion anyway, is more appealing than what they were serving.

And talk about the Law Of Attraction In Action... My intent was to go to the Hillcrest market, the biggest farmers' market in town, and learn. But it just so happened that the same day there was a street fare going on in down town Hillcrest. It was huge! Covered several city blocks. And the best part for me was there were probably 4-5 times the number of food venders as at the farmers' market. More data!!

Now back to the "big surprise" regarding the ridiculously long list of government regs. I did read someplace that SD was somewhat more lax on the regs than most counties, but I didn't expect this. NONE of the booths had even a fraction of the regs covered. Sure, the ones that any reasonable person would expect: clean work area, covered food, simple hand washing station, etc. But that's all. This can be done for almost a tenth of the cost of what I was expecting.

Things just keep falling into place, one after the other.