Brand New Challenges

Understand your expectations for an on-farm brand before diving in

Picture this: your farm grows an ingredient (red currants, let’s say), and you always tuck away a couple of pounds to make your famous Delicious Jam. Your family loves it — even your crazy picky mother-in-law. Friends start texting you asking if you’ve got a spare jar they can tuck into a gift basket, and the kids encourage you to “just walk into the grocery store and ask if they’re interested.” Any of this sounding familiar?

Deciding to start a brand as a farm is not a decision to be made lightly, but it could have quite a positive impact. I started a granola brand called Teffola using the teff and buckwheat grown, cleaned, and processed on our farm in southern Michigan. I started with $4,000 and a single recipe, with no experience. I was as much of a novice as you could get.

So let’s go through some of the questions you should ask yourself before you get too far down the path of researching commercial kitchens and promising samples to the local co-op.

Is the Product Actually Good?

First, critically examine the product itself. Is it really that good? It’s one thing for people who love you to say they like it — and they probably genuinely do. What you have to keep in mind is that the consumer packaged goods (CPG) world is a challenging, cutthroat industry.

You need to find extremely honest friends of friends who have nothing to risk if your feelings are hurt. If strangers haven’t paid you for Delicious Jam, ask a farmstand to set it out with some samples. I promise you that feedback is worth twice its weight in gold.

What Do You Expect the Brand to Become?

The next big question is what your expectations are for this brand and what it could become. The first option is a side venture. This level is where the brand supports the work of the farm and is an outlet for what you already grow. You could probably make do with the people you already work with (yourself, a partner, or a farmhand). The footprint is smaller, there are minimal marketing efforts, and stress is much lower because it’s not the focal point of the farm.

Maybe a standalone business is more your style. The farm and the brand support each other, and your time might be split between the two, with a smaller, more nimble team helping you run the brand because there are multiple flavors and a lot of moving parts. There are distributors, pallets of packaging, and large production runs with hefty price tags. It’s a regular business with stress and reward. The farm probably can’t grow enough product for the brand unless you’re extremely comfortable with risk.

Or do you want a scalable company where the brand is the priority over the farm? There’s outside capital, which means fundraising and shared ownership, inviting a host of other people and their opinions. A scaling company means a team with benefits packages and systems for every area of the business. Your farm is providing a fraction of the ingredient volume needed for production runs.

This is a serious business that requires your full attention, but Delicious Jam and other products have launched in stores across the country, and you’re telling your farm’s story and sharing values with millions of people through marketing.

Do You Have the Resources to Support the Expectations?

Do you have the resources to support your expectations? Each type of expectation can be the right answer for you if you have the means to support it. All the work necessary to build and maintain a brand can be outsourced, from recipe development to bookkeeping to merchandising to sourcing. Cash is instrumental, and skill is helpful but not necessary. You have to either be willing to spend the time to learn the skills or pay for someone else’s.

The standalone business and scalable company will have demands that stretch you beyond your comfort zone, and you will constantly be learning. The side venture might have fewer demands on time or capital, but that also means there’s a risk of it stalling without someone keeping momentum going. Funding large production runs is just like the year you went from test-plot size to full scale thanks to a contract. In the CPG world, you might have some of that production run already sold, but there are no guarantees that you’ll see a profit, especially with chargebacks from distributors.

And the final question: Why do you want to start a brand? What’s pulling you to a product? Stability for the farm? Is the younger generation looking for a project to sink their teeth into? Creating a brand is a great way to diversify your operations, although it requires an almost completely different skill set than farming. On the surface, there are many similarities to farming: slim margins, immense workload, and more risk than the average person can shoulder. Selling a product has a lot of great days, especially when you watch the harvest go from your farm to someone’s cart for the first time. There’s a unique sense of pride because you’re embodying the type of food we want the world to eat — food that supports soil health, good working conditions, and nutrient-dense outcomes. It goes beyond the satisfaction of watching the trucks haul out.

A word of caution: Even if every single person you know loves Delicious Jam and says they will buy it, they are not enough to support an entire business. You will have to pitch buyers who do not care about you. You’ll have to navigate a multitude of marketing platforms and learn the rules for each sales channel. If you decide to shut down the brand, you will lose all the money invested in packaging, the hours invested in sales calls, and the relationships you fought so hard to build. The odds of selling the brand as a small company (and in this world, small means under $10 million in revenue per year) are so slim that I’ve heard of it happening once in the eight years I’ve been in CPG.

As for my brand, I have embodied the mindset of every single type of expectation, but it wasn’t until more recently that I realized those expectations were only useful if I had the resources to support them. For much of the first six years of Teffola, I sat at scalable-company expectations with somewhere just above side-venture resources. I don’t recommend that strategy. For Teffola, I’ve shifted into viewing it as a side venture because I have other career interests. I work with farmers and processors on their value-added projects and can slip back into CPG mode whenever Teffola needs me. I spent a lot of money trying to force the brand to become something it wasn’t. Now it serves the lifestyle I want.

Creating a brand to have a guaranteed market for your harvest has been done many times because it’s a good idea. Current market trends in healthy food and attention on farmers can tip the scales in favor of launching Delicious Jam. Just know that 85 percent of new CPG products fail in the first year. Learn from my expensive mistakes and answer these questions before taking the next step.