“Similarly, you can’t put a local carrot, all misshaped and yellowish in color, into some food service offering or the Price Chopper… a carrot isn’t a carrot here, it’s a marketable product that fits into its place the same way you fit boxes or cans onto shelves,” she explained. “To go from farm to food chains involves processing, which is expensive. And the other forms of distribution such as CSAs and farm markets just aren’t scalable as business models.”
What Donna Williams found was needed for local agriculture, she came around to realizing, was a new distribution model. Enter Field Goods…
Setting up her business with a high school intern and her dad’s station wagon, emblazoned with the nifty logos she had hired a professional to design, she used her new company to engage and meet every challenge she could think of. Chief among these was the large amounts of waste that occur in the veggie market…which Field Goods knocked away by taking away customer choice.
Their replacement? Fun bags, great products, and an education element involving use of the Internet and printed recipes and info sheets on what was included in each week’s bags.
Williams explained how she used her own money to start Field Goods, not wanting the complications of investors. Because she doesn’t use water, she’s seen as a distribution business and works with state Ag & Markets regulations, not the Department of Health. She inaugurated the business in January of 2011 and was making her first deliveries by that summer…and made sure she would have product from the start by investing in a Columbia County farm that’s still running.
“I have an incredibly diversified background — came from Syracuse, went to Mt. Holyoke, worked on Wall Street, got an MBA to get away from banking, ran a division at Doubleday, wrote my own books and taught business at St. Rose. I bring it all to this work,” she added. “I ended up here at my parents’ home after surgery and changed my life. And this is what’s come of it.”
Williams seems very happy with her lot, and what she’s done with it. She’s busy but beaming.
“Some farmer pointed out that I have become the old-time vegetable peddler, going door to door with a cart,” Williams noted with a hearty laugh. “We just use a website and e-blasts to remind everyone to wash their veggies, and how to cook things we give them. The criteria for our recipes is that they take 15 minutes or less, use less than four ingredients, and can be eaten without fussing by a six year old.”
For the recipes and other materials, Williams works with a couple of her employees and her husband, Kim MacLean, who used to own Stewart House in Athens when it was one of the region’s top restaurants. She adds her own “sassy” voice, in the final round, making everything fun.
And she fully understands how revolutionary what she is doing with Field Goods is…
“I market what we do directly to Human Resource folks in big companies, explaining how this is a different way for them to meet their wellness mandates coming down from their insurance providers; I mean, how many walks can one take?” she noted. “With our delivered bags, you get the vegetables, you eat the vegetables, and you don’t go to the supermarket as much which means you don’t buy the cookies each time you’re there. It changes everything…”
Conehead cabbage
So where can you find Field Goods, besides on line?
Mostly in the wealthier suburbs of the Capital Region, Williams answered, because that’s where she started marketing. She works with big office parks and companies up there… but also distributes through several libraries and salons, as well as smaller businesses such as a local fishmonger who likes being able to sell veggies with their own perishable products.
Field Goods is looking to push that later area of symbiosis as part of its growth plans, which include starting out a fourth pick up/delivery van…and great care that the company’s growth isn’t too fast, since Williams knows how success can hurt a business as easily as failure.
As she talked, bags were put together for that afternoon’s delivery…including specialized cherry tomatoes, kale, three sorts of peppers, Saturn peaches, a salad mix, and tomatillos…as well as sugar cube cantaloupes and “conehead” cabbage for special orders.
Williams explained how the cabbage she asked to be grown by one farmer was what sauerkraut was made from, because of its added sweetness, but unknown in retail markets because of its look…similar to the famous Saturday Night Live characters from outer space.
“Not the sort of thing people would normally buy in a store or at a farmers’ market, but when they get it in our bags they all get excited as if it were Christmas,” Donna Williams added. “Which adds to that voice I use in my e-blasts and recipes…that of your mother urging you to eat your vegetables. And adding how fun they can be.”++
For more on Field Goods, and Williams, visit their website at www.field-goods.com.
