 So I'll go ahead and introduce, we have Joanne Bodie, Allison Moon, Jan Libby, and Andrea Ebelsiezer. We'll start with Joanne. Bodie's Moonlight Gardens is owned and operated by Joanne Rokie Bodie and Beanie Bodie. Together they grow diverse vegetables and a 14 acre pumpkin patch. Produce is marketed locally at the Kusuth County Farmers Market and through an 85 member CSA. Pumpkins are sold wholesale for the first time in 2020 on the farm for UPIC customers. Joanne has been responsible for meal kit testing, graphic design assistance, and marketing support. We have Allison Moon. Allison operated the Daily Bread, a commercial bakery featuring certified organic whole grain breads and a restaurant highlighting locally grown foods in a seasonal menu. Today she creates delicious dishes for a home delivery catering business called Good for Thought LLC. Allison has been responsible for recipe development on the meal kit team. And next we have Jan Libby. Jan and her husband Tim Landgraf have operated one step at a time gardens since 1996, selling CSA shares until 2018 and continues to sell product through North Iowa Fresh. Jan helped to found and served as the executive director for Healthy Harvest of North Iowa, a non-profit supporting local food system development from 2011 until 2019. She helped to found and assist with management of North Iowa Fresh, LLC. Jan has been responsible for overall grant management on the meal kit team. And last but not least, we have Andrea Abelsheiser. Andrea is a broker manager for North Iowa Fresh, LLC, a food hub in North Iowa that works with more than a dozen local farmers and serves more than 200 families with their Bounty Box CSA program as well as wholesale to grocers, restaurants, food bank and schools. Andrea has been active in local food sales, marketing and food system development since 2013. Andrea is responsible for overall project management. So we'll go ahead and turn it over to you ladies. Thank you. I'm gonna go ahead, go ahead, Andrea. Yep, I'm just gonna share the screen here and then we'll be ready to go. And as Andrea is doing that, so welcome to lessons and insights from our local meal kit development project. This is a Sarah Farmer Rancher Grant. Just a quick technical note, we are going to use a video clip in just a couple of slides here. There'll be a little bit of a jump to the clip, run the clip, a little bit of a jump back to the slides. So don't be surprised if things jump around a little bit. And we are, as Christy mentioned, it's going to have some time for questions and answers at the end that we will take time to pick your brain and hopefully answer any questions. So carry on, Andrea. Okay, everything looks good there with the screen then. With the presentation. Yeah, it does. Okay, all right. So you're gonna advance it. Oh, there you go, maybe. There we go. All right, so I think we have a pretty good overview of our roles. This was written primarily by Andrea and myself, and then we roped in Ropeki Bodhi over there in Algona. I mean, Allison and Joanne and Andrea are some of the most dynamic women in North Iowa that I am privileged to work with. So Joanne does such a great job with Bodhi's Moonlight Garden. And as we looked at this question about exploring meal kits, it was a good chance because we are two distinctively different CSA operations to get both groups involved. And it's been very insightful along the way as we have gone. So I think each of us will have a chance to articulate a little bit more about our role. You know, starting off just for context for this project, 2018 is the year that North Iowa Fresh was moving, was just piloting a CSA. They had been doing wholesale, which has a very small margin. And in North Iowa, just not enough market base. So we had to start looking at direct to consumer and the CSA model made sense. But this is also the time when there's a fair amount of chatter coming out that the marketplace trends around CSAs were changing. So, you know, we're starting to hear some noise that the CSA market is stagnating, is becoming a little saturated. These are national statistics, but we were also hearing this in the state of Iowa. And we know a number of CSAs that were feeling that pressure. We can even point to Grinnell Heritage Farm, you know, running into a situation where they felt they needed to make a significant change at the end of 2019, and some others that had pulled back. So they were responding to these marketplace trends. And just when North Iowa Fresh was saying, ah, we're hoping to grow membership. So, you know, let's think about how these trends, including folks spending a lot more time eating out, how are they impacting some of the assumptions? So then go ahead to the next slide. We're looking at those and saying, okay, not only are we looking at the stagnation, we're looking at consumers increasing demand for convenience and we're seeing the arrival and expansion on the marketplace of these commercial convenient meal kits. So we had been looking at that and saying, how do we take that information and use that in some of our strategic planning going forward? One of the things we did was, within North Iowa Fresh's share options, and I assume those who are participating on this Zoom understand CSA as community supported agriculture, a marketing model where a farmer makes a commitment to grow product and makes regular weekly deliveries, consumers make upfront financial commitment and buy that product for a whole season. So that closer partnership is the essence of the CSA. Those relationships are really important. So one of the features that North Iowa Fresh introduced in 2019 was offering a customized box, which is hard to do on a CSA on your own. Tim and I had run a CSA for quite a few years and I mean, I've heard some people do it, but we couldn't have figured out doing a specifically customized box, but some of the software that NIF had could allow us to do that. So that aside, we also decided it made sense to research and develop these locally tailored meal kits. And so that is what led us to the Sarah Farmer Rancher Grant with our goal of having those ready to bring to market in 2020 and using that as one of the strategies to help attract and retain CSA members really trying to expand our base for those folks who are looking for that kind of convenience. And how we designed that project was I think a pretty important part where we really trying to involve our subscribers and produce together in the testing and the creating and through that to build some relationships which we also anticipated would contribute to the attraction and retention of CSA members. Sort of building on that relationship essence of the CSA. So what's next? However, this was planned and conceived in 2018, awarded in 2019, and then we all experienced 2020 which taught us to be careful about assumptions that we make in many, many ways. And so it unfolded and we'll get to that a little bit more but Joanne's gonna give you kind of the cliff note version. Absolutely. So as Jan was saying, things didn't go exactly as we anticipated and one of the reasons for that was COVID-19 happening right in the middle of CSA sign up season or what would have been to major planning and preparation time for this. So our assumption going in had been that we would need to build that CSA audience. Well, what actually happened was we had more interest in local foods than we'd had in years and there were a bunch of different things happening there. For one, like many of us didn't know if we would have our local farmers markets if those would be allowed until May. And so we were maybe building that CSA a little bigger than normal because we weren't sure what was gonna happen. That demand was just incredible. And I think a lot of people felt that on their farms and in their food businesses. And so it kind of changed the whole process there. It just turned those assumptions upside down. In addition, it was a challenging time to introduce a new concept and something different because this was not quite the same program that people had signed up before. This was the whole meal kit. And so people were signing up for what they knew was had had some experience doing the CSA, the fresh food and the whole meal kit concept. We just didn't have the time we needed to really promote and market that to as a new thing. So we kind of built upon that commercial meal kit model though at that time. And it did prove it's one of those things that sounded great. And it thought we spot, well, this couldn't be much harder than putting the CSA together. And it's traditional and original sense, but it turned out to be quite more complicated for both Boaties Moonlight Gardens and North Iowa Fresh. And so after we kind of worked through what this model could be for us, I can speak just for Boaties Moonlight Gardens. It wasn't a model that we felt we could accomplish. So we ended up not even doing it in 2020. North Iowa Fresh did do it, but I wouldn't say it's a model that either of us would consider again in the way that we had planned it. So, but that's not the end of the story. We can't just assume that 2021, everything will just go back to normal. It's kind of like when you buy a box of Christmas lights and once you take them out of the box, there's no stopping it back in exactly like it did. I mean, once 2020 happens, it can never un-happen. And so, and even the governor, we've got a little short clip here that we wanna show. So once these assumptions have changed, they will be changed going forward. So I'll let this clip play here. Here we go. Iowa Success has always been about turning obstacles into opportunities and overcoming adversity together. The post-COVID world won't be the same as the pre-COVID world, and it shouldn't. We've learned a lot. Entire sectors of our economy were forced to innovate overnight and adapt to survive. We can approach Iowa's economic recovery in a number of ways. We can return to where we were, which is realistic, but still an ambitious goal. Or we can take what we've learned and the innovation that's been applied over the past 10 months and capitalize on that opportunity to reimagine, modernize, and possibly restructure everything from healthcare and education to our workforce and quality of life. It's about ensuring our future prosperity is widespread and reaches all people in all parts of Iowa. So we were, Iowa's particularly pleased to have the governor make such an extensive assessment of the impact of COVID-19. And obviously, we're still not talking about the meal kit thing yet, but we're talking about the context under which we're operating. And I think her words are pretty powerful, recognizing that things aren't gonna go just back to normal, that we have lessons learned that we can capitalize on, that it's an opportunity to reimagine, modernize, and restructure everything. So I think that invites some broader imagining about CSAs and how these changes may impact them. So I'm gonna sort of leave it at that and then sort of hand it off for Joanne to help us get into the specifics of this project next. So one of the many lessons we learned in 2020 is that we can create some new strategies. So we're gonna kind of give you that middle of the story. For the next 30 minutes, our team's gonna talk with you about just a brief overview of the model that was developed, telling you some more details about that, and then talk a little bit more also about some of the challenges that we faced. You know, why didn't it work for our two CSA farms? We've got a lot of experience with CSA, wide network for the meal kits. And then maybe some considerations and opportunities for other CSAs or food businesses. So just because it didn't work out on our farms, what changes or differences on your farms might make it a better model for you. And then also how we're tweaking the model a little bit for 2021. So we'll go over all those different points and then we'll open it up for some Q&A and just have comments about the project, questions, any open discussion on how 2020 lessons might help us better understand CSA development and changes in a broader sense. So we will dive right in talking about the project. And I think Andrea will lead us in that. Yes. So I guess the main thing was, like Janet said earlier, we had been seeing that a lot of these commercial meal kits had been popping up on, you know, mailings we received and Facebook and everywhere else, you could see the Hello Fresh and the Blue Apron and all of those meal kits. And there was also the trend that Jan referenced that people were looking for convenience, things that were easy to make at home, quick meals, things that didn't require a lot of thinking about meal planning and stuff like that. So of course we wanted to look at what was already available and kind of take a look at the choices that were already out there on the marketplace and see what people liked about them, what people didn't like about them. So we actually took quite a serious look at what was available and we found probably close to a couple dozen different meal kits that we initially evaluated. And we looked at them for things like the comments that people were saying about whether they liked the meals, whether the packaging was appropriate, whether the flavor profiles were appropriate, the price points, all of that kind of stuff. And then we kind of looked more closely at the meals that we thought might be close to what we were thinking of doing because of course, we're a CSA farm and a bunch of farmers and Joann's farm is mostly vegetables. And so we wanted to focus, have meals that were really focused and centric around vegetables to the point that we even were looking at having a vegetarian option as well as a meat option to really highlight the vegetables. So we looked at some offerings from these different meal kit companies that existed and kind of decided to choose some of the meal kits that had strong evices on vegetables and we ended up with these four that are shown on your screen. So we ordered meals from all of those during the same week that as you can see from this picture, they all arrived at my doorstep on the same day and we had dates for the next day to meet together and cook up all these meals. So we ordered two full meals for four people from each of these four companies and then we cooked them all up in the kitchen at the church here in Clear Lake and evaluated them on using a pretty detailed spreadsheet where we ranked everything one to five on taste and recyclable materials, presentation, quality of ingredients, all kinds of things like that. And we also, like Chan mentioned, kind of focusing on the partnership between the growers and the buyers, we did offer a couple of these meals actually out to some of our customers. So we asked a couple of customers if they would cook the meals and taste them and evaluate them based on the same scale that we used in order to get a little bit more of a sense of kind of the general perspective of what people like and what people didn't like about the commercial kits. So we could use that when we were developing our own kits. So those were the kinds of products. We also, when we were developing our own kits, we wanted to focus on a few things that were kind of important to us. Things were about focusing on items that were abundant around our area, easy to grow, but maybe items that people were less familiar with cooking it on their own. So we could give them some ideas and some, I guess, inspiration as to how they might better utilize these items that we knew we could grow more of. Also some products that highlighted some of the other local producers in our area, honey, meat, things like that, so that we could bring into the fold kind of some other farms that if you were gonna create your own meals at home, you would have to find more than just vegetables. So we wanted to highlight those farmers. And also a big thing for us was minimizing waste. A lot of the companies that are doing the commercial meal kits, they send a lot of items in little pre-packaged baggies or things that may or may not be recyclable in certain areas, but certainly it's a lot of waste. So we did wanna focus on those types of additional goals as we were thinking about our own meal kit. So before I get into the details of what we came up with, I am going to let Alison give you a little bit about the recipe development process. Yep, hi. My role was to design recipes and meal kits that showcase the local ingredients, excuse me, while being on trend and still delicious, things that are really super important. You can go ahead to the next slide. For our recipe development, we really looked at these commercial kits like Andrea was saying and tried to figure out what was important to us and to the people that were in the CSAs and members of the community. Our evaluation definitely looked at flavor profile. That's one of the things that's obviously probably most important people they wanted to taste good. Adequate servings, did they say what they had inside would make that many servings and did it actually happen that way? The appearance of the products upon receipt, did it come in a box that, how did it look? Did that make a difference to people if it had colors or not colors or instructions? The time required for preparation, was it accurate? Was that important to people? Did they like that it didn't take long to make or were they willing for something that would take a little bit longer? And of course the packaging is like Andrea said, we don't want things that would be a lot of waste and some of those companies did have that. We wanted to keep our waste footprint very small, kind of a thing. Thank you. Making the local connection, definitely, that was one thing that was super important to us was trying to find the other people in the area that were gonna help us put this together because everything's not gonna be in the CSA. There's gonna be other things that we need, the ones that created needed meat that were a meat option. Where are we gonna get that? Could we find that locally? It was really definitely important. And so we made a lot of really good connections with people around to try to understand their production schedule and the other options of things that were available, including honey and eggs. Menu, research, and testing. Yeah, the recipes shared, we got from a lot of different areas. It was really super fun to get it put together. Some things we got from the CSA members or owners, time-tested recipes that members already really loved. That was great. I had a lot of experiences being a chef and so that really helped me out. But there were other recipes that just needed maybe tweaking and some that we just had to design from the bottom up. And it was super fun, difficult in some ways as far as we had to go by a growing schedule. You know what's gonna be available at what time. So these are just a quick overview of the kits that we developed. For each month, we tried to have two options. Like the girls said, one with meat and one without so that we could cover the basis for every one that needed it. The first one, June kale frittata with garden green salad and roasted parmesan veggies. Really good to have kale in there. People want to learn how to use it. Roasted veggies, another way to do things maybe some people hadn't tried yet. And the other option was simply perfect meatballs with fruit vegetable risotto and spring salad. Awesome to have something new like a risotto. Everybody wants to learn how to make that. Next in July, we had green and beans burritos with homemade salsa in the south of the border slaw. Another tested recipe, the beans burrito. Oh, it was awesome. Everybody loved it. And then the other option was coconut pork and cabbage with Indian kale salad and non-bread. We tried to bring in things that were a little bit different that possibly families hadn't tried. Other flavors from other parts of the world and still make it something that they felt okay to try. It was easily accessible to them and it didn't feel scary. For August, we had grilled eggplant parmesan with dressed green beans. Definitely tried to bring in the grilling thing for this time of year. Everybody loves to grill. So that's a real pull. People wanted to have that one. The other option with meat was garlic grilled pork chops with marinated vegetable kebabs. Who could say no to that? People really liked it. Again, more grilling. And then in September, we rounded things up with one selection of eggplant tortilla pizza with meat carrot apple salad. And the tortilla pizza was really just a neat way to showcase the eggplant, something new and different. A good way to get kids involved in the family to help. And lots of times there are more app to eat, something that they've tried to put together. The second option was squash and apple cheddar grottin with many meatloaves and roasted cauliflower. And that was really fun. Being able to make meatloaf a different way and being able to individualize it. So it was super fun making these meal kits and the reception was good. The people liked them and that was great. I'll pass it back to Andrea. All right, I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about the planning and the product sourcing for the meal kits. Obviously we're focusing on meals that have a lot of vegetable components because that's what we know and love through our CSA. But we also need to consider all the other things that come in a meal. The meat, the spices, the condiments and all of those types of things. So of course, like Allison had mentioned we were looking at the seasonality and when we plan the meals we plan them to match up in the right season. And we were able to do a pretty good job with our CSA planning to make sure that we were gonna have the products ready at the right time. And for the most part, that was the easiest of our challenges here with our development of the kit because we are pretty actively planning for the CSA already. Our producers are pretty familiar with needing to have things ready at a certain time. And we were able to use products like we said that were generally abundant and easy to have ready. That being said, that wasn't entirely without glitches but those were ones we were able to overcome pretty easily with our knowledge of our producers and other farms in the area that might have something if we were short. But the other items that we had to source specifically some of the dairy products, eggs, things like that that we don't have a farmer in our area, a local farmer that we could source from for those products. There are a few around. We ran into trouble with some of the farms not having the egg handlers license. So and things like that we don't really have a dairy that works closely with us. So we needed to find a place to get those items from. Also not being in touch with that as closely the cost of what those products were gonna cost, how big of quantities we're gonna have to order. If things came in case sizes, what we're gonna do with the extra, where we're gonna store that, how we're gonna get it in the first place and how we're gonna get it to our aggregation area and all of these logistical items started to come into play. Luckily for us, we do have a very close partner in the North Iowa area here in Clear Lake simply nourished their specialty and organic and local specialty store. And they were able to help us very closely with helping or getting the items that we needed that we didn't have access to directly through our CSA. So in addition to the local farmers, some of these farmers, the meat producers, we do have a relationship with and we do offer some of their products on our storefront, on our a la carte menu for our CSA members to be able to add things to their regular vegetable boxes. So those ones were fairly easy to source. But then the items like I mentioned that needed to be broken down like the cheeses that needed to be in a specific amount of cheese per the recipe and a specific amounts of spices, like especially for the Indian-based dishes, those were more difficult because they weren't things that we necessarily had on hand. So I think I will pass this over to Joanne now to talk a little bit about the branding and marketing. Sure. So one of the things that we did early on was decide to brand these meal kit boxes under the same label or logo or brand. And that worked well for us because we could combine our efforts. But I'd also want to interject that in some ways it was more difficult because if you're used to marketing your own farm and your own business, it's kind of hard to create something that applies to both. And sometimes it's what's good for everybody is good for nobody because it's not as specific or as farm-related or, you know, when you market your own firm, you're very used to telling your personal story. So it was, it did present a challenge in that way, but we came up with the name that we felt that fit both of our farms. We really wanted to come up with a very simple, clean logo, kind of matching some of the other ones. If you recall back to that slide where we showed the four different ones we tried, they were very clean, very simple. And so we were going for a very similar design and we came up with Seasonal Chef and that's how we branded it. We really wanted it to reflect the seasonality and trying to get seasonal and local in there was too many words, right? But Seasonal Chef, we felt reflected what we were, what we were trying to do and what this project was really about. So we created that brand logo, some options there and our greatest investment of marketing time, however, was spent on designing the recipe card. Being that was what we felt really defined the customer experience. So when you get that box into your kitchen, do you see pictures that help lead you to have an expectation of to know what to expect when you're done? No, the picture really tells the story. This is what I'm going for, right? So we wanted pictures, not just at the end result but through the process because that whole saying that a picture is worth a thousand words is the truth when you're trying to describe what cutting a certain way looks like or cutting out the core, that kind of thing. Also I wanted to be very detailed in what's included in the box, what's fresh, what is coming from your pantry. We had a little side box called the Pantry Booster which we'll probably talk about later and what things you're gonna need to provide from your kitchen and trying to keep that list to a minimum but just being reasonable. Like we don't wanna put little things of salt and pepper in there if everybody has it in their house, right? And that was part of the packaging discussion. We also wanted to make sure the directions were very, very clear because part of the assumption that we made was that people who buy meal kits we can't pretend to know like what kind of kitchen experience they have. And so providing every detail and walking people through the process was important to that customer experience and for the end result to turn out how we wanted. So we invested a lot of time in each recipe creating the directions, the instructions, the taking photos and so that took a lot of time but I think it was worth it. Here's how they turned out, here's an example. So you can see that we let them know how long it's gonna take, how many servings we're talking about, all those other things that I mentioned. So that was where a lot of our time was spent on that recipe card design. And when talking about some of the marketing ideas and planning, you really, when assessing is this right for me? Would this be right for my farm? We kind of indicated that it wasn't the greatest fit on all levels for our farms but your farm might be different. Do you have a marketing plan where this would currently fit into? If you're doing online sales already this might be a great pickup option. We were hoping to get advanced sales for this and Andrea will get into that a little bit more but if you're able to fly a little more by the seat of your pants in the middle of the season you might be able to develop some of these things mid-season. We were doing this all in advance of the seasons so everything needed to be planned and nailed down and then we would work to the plan but if you're able to look around and say good grief or I got more eggplant than I thought and I need some eggplant recipes I'm gonna throw some together. If you have the staff available to take the time to do that in the middle of the season we found that we did not. We're kind of all systems go in July, August and June or we just need hands harvesting and picking and delivering and no one has time for developing at that time. So it's also a great opportunity to look at those like they did, nor have I refreshed looked with simply nourish and develop some of those partnerships and maybe they take on the lion's share of that development and communication and things like that and you're supplying the food kind of in a more traditional CSA way. So those are some of the things that we talked about that you could change. Go ahead Andrea, you can pick it up from there on some of the more specifics. Yeah, I think that's a good point I think that Joanne just mentioned is the idea of having a partner that might have the time to do that a portion of it that the CSA farm may not or if you're interested in adding a enterprise of some sort to your farm and have that be a focus because we had a lot of really good feedback from the kits that we did send out the food was very well received. It was just a lot of the logistical challenges that is making it difficult for us to look at the same model for the way it was this year. But the way we sold are the kits this year and like Joanne said, we had intended that both farms would give this a try this year and with COVID that just didn't seem to be feasible. So we did want to at least get it out there so we could get a little feedback. We didn't spend a lot of time on marketing as much as we had anticipated initially. Basically what we sent it out to our CSA members and we did some social media posting and stuff, some social media targeted ads and things like that to try and reach to people that showed interest in other meal kit options and maybe had purchased other meal kits in the past. But we sent it out in that way sort of as a subscription in line with our current or existing CSA model. So you were gonna get one meal each month at the beginning of the month. You could choose from one of two options. So we had the vegetarian option or the meat option and we did identify if things were gluten-free or dairy-free but we didn't really specifically plan meals so that they would have one of each. But in most cases, I think we did have at least one of the two meals be the gluten-free meal. And we asked people to commit to buying one meal for four months, so four meals over the course of the season. And then because those didn't, we sold a few but it wasn't all that many. We did decide mid-season that it sort of related to what I said earlier about the buying things from our distributor is some things came in packages at 12, some things came in packages at six, somewhere in 24. So we kind of each month to month decide, okay, we have to have at least 12 of these or 24 of these in order to purchase. So we'll sell 24 of these kits this month. And so we also listed them on our storefront if we had beyond what we're already pre-sold, we listed the remaining ones on our storefront for a slightly higher price because they didn't make the upfront commitment. And, but kind of as a last minute, maybe add on to their CSA box for that week. I guess, yes. So I guess going on a little bit more about the partnerships and how we kind of solve some of those problems. We did, like we mentioned, work with SimplyNourish. They were great at helping us with those products that we couldn't find locally, especially things like the cheese and the spices and things like that. We were able to ask them to break down the cheese into the required sizes, which was also another interesting consideration was the conversion of the recipe quantities into the ordering quantities. That was an unanticipated complexity. We also had some issues around the packaging and some things need to be kept cold, some things needed to be kept frozen. And that was a complexity that came up as we were packaging things as well. So this is kind of an example of a couple of the kits here. And as things came in the boxes, the refrigerated items all came together in the bag or the box that we used, and then the freezer items had to come separately in a cooler. So you can see in the one picture there, it says remember to pick up your cold items. So that was also a little detail that we had to manage. So as we mentioned earlier, we also wanted to avoid waste. So we did try and standardize the condiments I guess or the spices and stuff like that across the recipes so that we wouldn't have to give balsamic vinegar in one recipe and red wine vinegar in the next recipe. Allison worked really hard to standardize those items and use the red wine vinegar and all of those recipes across the season using olive oil in all of the recipes when it called for an oil. And then to some degree, the garlic powder basil and oregano are fairly standard items so we were able to use those multiple times. And if we needed a specific, I know one recipe called for time, we didn't have that just in that one recipe box, but for the things that were being used multiple times instead of giving little packets, each time you got a meal kit, you were given this pantry booster as part of your subscription at the beginning of the year or of the season. And then you were kind of expected to hold on to those items. As your other meals came along, you would still have a good supply of those items in your box or saved up from their first box. Packaging and distribution. We tried a couple of different things. We were, initially we tried these paper bags. We kind of liked the idea of kind of it looking like a shopping, picked it up at the shopping store or whatnot, but the bags were a little bit cumbersome because we were using the CSA box, for our CSA boxes, we used the half-bushel box and to deliver the half-bushel box with the bag. Separately, it was a bit difficult for our delivery driver to be able to manage all the bags separately. So then the second go round, we went, you can see on the slide, we went to a box that did work a better with being able to contain the items and stack it a little bit better with our CSA boxes, but still many of our items, like when we had jar of spaghetti sauce and some of the produce items that were awkward and weird shape didn't always fit quite perfectly into the box. And so that's an area that would still need to have a little bit of exploration as to what is the best type of packaging for this one-time use sort of box. So in order to solve some of our problems, that we came across, we worked with the Simply Nurse to do some of the breakdown of our products. Like the cheese I had mentioned, you need to have like half a cup of cheese in your recipe, but then you need a certain number of ounces of cheese to actually give to the customer so they can end up with a half a cup of cheese and things like that. So they did some breakdown for us there, we would buy the cheese in bulk and they would package it into one, those required amounts. But we also work with Iowa Valley RC&B to try and create a interactive tool that could more easily convert those recipes, the quantities in the recipe, convert them into ordering quantities so that we would be able to one time put in, half a cup of cheddar cheese, converts to four ounces of cheese in bulk that we need to purchase. So those types of things those conversions at first were very cumbersome and difficult for us to kind of do it each time, but with this Excel tool, it's gonna be a lot easier in the future to be able to convert those much more easily. So we've had a lot of good partners along the way helping us to refine the process as we go. Let's see. I think that I'm on still here for this section. I guess we'll talk and hear a little bit about whether the kit was meeting our goals and what we did to find a better fit, I guess, for the meal kit within our CSAs. Or Jen, maybe we'll talk about pricing here a little bit first. Oops, you're on mute, Jen. Very good, very good detail. All sorts of sailing. Let's see if I can recall what I was saying. Back to our goals. Our goals were to create a meal kit product that could work within our systems, that helped to attract and retain customers. And also how we did the project. We really wanted to be able to engage our customers as sort of some co-creators. Like Andrea said, we had them help do some testing of the commercial kits at the beginning. But another piece of the design was they would be available to do some hands-on with a field day in the summer of 2020. Well, we all know that those kinds of close interactions in a kitchen facility was not going to work in 2020. As Andrea said, and Joanne alluded as well, the marketing was not able to happen in quite the way that we had anticipated. Actually, when we looked at the customers who did buy it, we ended up realizing we're really getting a lot of our existing customers. They're just buying another product, which is great, but it really wasn't achieving our goal of reaching out and bringing more people in. And in fact, I think that has something to do with this model. If you look at the commercial model of meal kits, they are sort of a standalone product, a standalone business that's able to sell them sort of on the fly, da, da, da, da, da. That kind of management of information details doesn't work that well in our situation. We wanted to be able to know that the sales were set and then line up the product that we needed to fulfill each month. So we needed to have that known ahead. It wasn't something that we could do quite on the fly. So we do have some different, I think, business models that are playing against each other in that situation. And then, and I say, you look at all those recipes that Alison outlined that we developed and Andrea has sort of elaborated a little bit on there as well. A lot of great products were created, but this is where the rubber hits the road when we start to look at the price of these product costs. So that's what this chart is. We're looking at what it costs to create these different vegetable meal kits each month and then each of the meal-based meal kits. And Andrea, I don't know if we can, I don't know if it's just me on my slide. I can't see the very bottom that says what the average cost is, but I think the average, I don't know if you can, yeah, the average cost on the vegetable was 20 something or other and the meat was like 24 or something. Yeah, you can see that better than I can. So that's a contrast between those two. Another factor that we looked at at the price of these meal kits is the number of local ingredients versus non-local ingredients. So when we had to reach out and buy more product cheeses or some of the special seasonings and so forth, that plays a little bit into here. And then when we look more detailed at the amount of time that our team spent and that we can break down into sort of a small enterprise budget analysis, recognize that we were selling these kits for $40 each. They were aimed to serve four people. So breaks down to about $10 of serving, which we felt was kind of in line with some of the market pricing. And you look at the average product cost, packaging cost, the product coordination and packing, all right? So all of those logistical details that Andrew has been talking about and then the packing and planning for maintaining the cold chain. We had to pack some that went in the cooler. We had to pack some other pieces that went into some freezing capacity. And then we had to make sure we didn't lose track of the frozen parts with the reiterated parts. We had some marketing. And again, maybe not as much as we would have done had we like found this to really be a profitable piece and really wanted to push the marketing out there because this is very much research and development stage, even in 2020. Each month, the customer got a printed recipe card. So it's just that cost. And as Joanne said, lots of thought and care were put into developing that. So it was a really sharp looking product. And we did get this assistance on breaking down non-local products from Simply Nourished. And they did that as support for what we were doing. So even these figures are not reflecting some of those costs. So you add that all up. And you can see that we are askew from the cost of a meal kit, you know, $20 off. And I figured these expenses, the product coordination, the marketing, paying at $20 an hour just sort of to keep that in mind. So when you look at that and you say, gosh, this looks like a great product, really great. I might want to add it to my CSA. We've identified some pretty significant barriers to that. I think, and Allison and I have had some conversation when we began this, we said, okay, when we look at what we want to charge for the product, $40 a meal kit. Allison's saying, you know, the restaurant philosophy is you want about 30% product cost, 30% staffing, and you want to be able to have 30% towards your profit. Where could we make any changes? Do we have more time committed to these product coordination and packing? If we could streamline that by using this Excel product, perhaps that could really help there. Marketing is another place that you could sell a lot more shares without necessarily expanding a lot of the marketing cost. But if you sell more shares, your product cost is going to go up. And some of those other things that, you know, how do you balance that? So we did not really wrestle with this question, but it's clearly a consideration and something to deal with. So with that said, where do we go here, cost breakdown? So I think Joanne, you're going to talk a little bit more. You've kind of touched on this a little bit, but I know you've been really good at helping us think about, it might not have worked for us, but perhaps there are some considerations for other businesses. I'll turn it to you. Exactly, and I'll keep this brief because it's getting to be about 120. I want to make sure we have some time for questions, but just because, so the main reason that it didn't work for us was because we're a firm that all the stuff that goes into our CSA comes from our farm. So just that extra time for sourcing, it just wasn't possible. And probably not just in a COVID year, but probably in reality any year during the season. And I just thought, why am I doing more work for less money? And that's a question you have to ask yourself, am I willing to do more work for less money? And the answer is no, then don't do that thing, no matter what it is, unless you really, really just want to do it for the fun of it because you enjoy it. But the CSA model just was a lot, lot easier. One of the questions that I saw was, do all the farms have a warehousing license? No, we do not have that. And so there was just too many infrastructure and logistical things for us to feel like it was worth it, which is too bad because it sound, I still love the idea of it, but that's why it was nice to be part of this project where we could really look at some of those questions and say, is it a good fit? Now, where would it be a good fit? It would be a great opportunity if a restaurant and a farm wanted to partner up because they would already be ordering on a regular basis. They would have probably more weekly or maybe a couple times a week ability to get things dropped off, whether it's the spices or the cheese or whatever. It would be a great fit for a food co-op or a food business, small grocery, like SimplyNourish that has the opportunity to, that really is committed and dedicated to those local food producers and wants to increase ways that they're working with them, be a great opportunity in there. Or if you're a farm that has a really broad range of products, maybe you do pork or beef or lamb or honey and all those things and you're looking for ways to kind of package those items. Be a great opportunity there. And if you have enough staff that you could dedicate somebody to this in the growing season, that they could develop some of these things depending on what you had in stock instead of the plan ahead model, it'd be a great opportunity to push out whatever you have a lot of by creating a meal around it, especially if you had somebody on site, if you had a restaurant on site on your farm or something like that who's able to develop those recipes or if you haven't developed yourself. So there's some ways you could make this work. And we just weren't able to make it work on our farms, right guys? But I'm not saying that no one could. So I will, in the interest of time, I'm going to pass this on to the next person who's talking, which I think is Andrea. I think if we just want to wrap it up with, I mean, we are also saying that the time constraints during season and we, because we're a multi-farm CSA, we're working with a lot of farmers that are bringing product to one location and we have one day to pack out everything and get it out the door to the next, out for delivery the next day. It's like an in and out type of system where we're not holding inventory. We don't have warehousing either, that type of stuff. So we needed to move things along and to add an extra complicated thing on the day that we're already packing 120 CSA boxes or more and wholesale and everything. It just didn't work. But we do want to acknowledge that the recipes we created were really great recipes. They do align very closely with what's available in season and we used a lot of products that were available at the right time of the year and we plan to use those recipes for our own, like maybe not as full meals, but at least in our newsletters and with our partners to highlight those products that we might have abundance of or be able to grow or have available. So we are gonna be working with Healthy Harvest of North Iowa to use those recipes on their website so that that can open it up to a lot more customers and also we are working on developing some additional recipes through this grant project that would also complement our CSA boxes and offer our CSA members more recipes that are directly aligned with their boxes. So a lot of times when we do our newsletter we've been just using either recipes that we know of or recipes off the internet and they may have some ingredients that are in our box but not like really focused on what's in the box that week. So we are going to be developing a few more recipes that really focus on our plan for the season and what's gonna be in a box in a certain week and how we can use the maximum number of produce items from our box in some recipes or a recipe that could complement our, like be evaluated to our CSA customers. So that is kind of where we're at. We think that we've done a lot of legwork creating these recipes and we wanna make sure that those get good use and I see there are a few questions so we probably need to try and answer those in the next few minutes. Yeah, Chris says that he would be interested in hearing what some of the constructive criticisms or feedback items were from your members. One that I think overall we had received extremely high ratings on all of the meal short of a couple of people that must not like the ingredients or the recipe itself but overall we had really high on the meal, the flavor, the quality of ingredients. I'd say the biggest complaint that I heard was just the time that it took to cook these items because all of these things were from scratch. Many of them included multiple items from scratch including for the eggplant tortilla pizza you even made the sauce from scratch you made the slaw and the dressing for the slaw was all, nothing came in a pre-packaged bottle of anything. So I'd say the biggest complaint we received was that the recipes were really good but they took a long time to prepare. I don't know anybody else remember any other feed specific? I think that's a good overview. Yeah. We haven't said to folks how many we sold and Andrea I think that we were in the 20 to 22 or 24 of these meal kits that we sold per month. Just so folks can. Yeah, it depended on a little on the month and like I said depended on a little bit on how many a certain case buys but anywhere between 12 to 24 of each meal depending on so it kind of varied but I think yeah 15 to 24 was probably in the fall part. Yep. Great. Emma is wondering if each grower has to have a warehousing license. We know we because everybody is just delivering everything to our aggregation site and it's pretty much in out. We're not holding inventory. Yeah, and I would just add that was the significant step with simply nourished because they were doing some breaking down a product. They have a certified kitchen license so that we know they could do that safely and then we just picked up the finished product. Okay, great. I have one from Marla. She says, so you had everything that was needed for that specific recipe each time for that kit, correct? Well, on our recipe cards we had a short list that gave people a couple of things they might need from their kitchen and because we were trying to minimize packaging and we wanted to identify things that people probably already have at home and don't need a little. So if you needed it like a half a cup of milk, it said on your instructions, you'll need a half a cup of milk and then it said you could use, if you were trying to do it dairy-free or whatever, different varieties of milk that you could use. And we did that also with breadcrumbs when it was like a quarter cup of breadcrumbs because we know that some people are trying to cook gluten-free or whatnot and then they can choose the type of breadcrumbs and they probably have some at home. So there were probably in each recipe, salt and pepper and maybe one other thing and the couple of recipes had probably three or four things that required from your own kitchen. If we only needed one egg, we asked them to provide their one egg but when we did the frittatas, we gave them a dozen. So it kind of, a little bit, we took a little bit of leeway on what seemed reasonable and in order to meet our goals of not sending a bunch of little things and also expect things that we expect people would have anyways. Okay, thank you. We have time for one more and it's from Chris. What did you learn that you'll adapt and use for your current programs? I think that's the main point that related to these recipe development and how we spent a lot of time on the recipe development. I think we definitely want to continue to utilize all the recipes that were created and also continue to create recipes that match well with the CSA boxes that we're providing. That's like the most common thing when we get back our questionnaire at the end of the year with our newsletter about our newsletter and what features of our newsletter and even from our analytics on our MailChimp, you can see the recipe is where people go and so I think that's a big value. Even though the meals, giving them all the parts of the meals might not work in our model. I think giving them the recipes that match up with their box is a very big value and like I said, we're gonna work with Healthy Harvest and they have a recipe, I guess, program that can print out the recipe and it can also print out a shopping list. So we can identify items that would be in your box. These products could be in your box, these items you could possibly order from another producer, a local producer and then these are the things that you're gonna have to purchase from a store or have in your own pantry. So I think that, I mean, for us that's, we're gonna definitely use all of that knowledge that we gained and then continue to use those recipes. Joanne, do you have anything to add? No, I feel like that kind of sums that up. Yeah, it's as far as what will change since we didn't do it the first time. I'll probably just be, I think what I've learned is that people really appreciate that if you can make it this much easier, they will appreciate it that much more. So we've always listed on our CSA newsletter what's in the box. I think I might add a shopping list for this box and that might make it that much easier. So if they're picking it up and wanna know when they've popped by fairway, what do they need to make the three recipes that have included in the newsletter, maybe that's one thing I could do for my customers that would be closer to a meal kit but also not really changing my workload that much for preparing the meal kit. So that's an option. Andrea, can you just flip to the next slide with our contact? We're welcome people to contact us if they have questions. I know we haven't probably answered everything but we will have examples of those recipe cards available. It's all developed from a SAR grant. So those things are available to share and so are our data and analytics that we have this far continuing to work on this Excel product. If anyone's interested because that's a pretty essential tool to work if you're doing along the model that we develop them with. So just- Yeah, that's a good point. The Excel tool that we started to develop we haven't fully utilized, like we kind of got it developed mid-season and didn't fully utilize it but that's a tool that got quite a bit of time spent on it. So if anybody is interested in trying it out or seeing if it might work in your operation to do some conversions then the biggest thing was converting from the recipe quantities to a ordering quantity and amalgamating that into like recipes and meals and making it easier to, I guess, keep track of all of those conversions and all of the ordering details. So I think that tool could be very helpful if a person had the right situation in which to use it. All right, well, we are out of time. I would like to thank Joanne, Allison, Jan and Andrea for taking your time today to be with us at our conference and all the wonderful content that you gave us and they did put their contact information, excuse me, up here if anyone has any additional questions that we didn't have time to get to. So again, thank you ladies for being with us today. Thank you. Thank you for everyone who sat in on it. Happy to share the information. Have a great day, rest of the conference. Thank you, Andrea and Allison.