Celebrating Our Customers

I am in a unique position of providing a product that meets a basic human need. Everyone needs to eat, and ideally eat quality nutrient dense foods. Too many people in our own community struggle with meeting this need every day. While I could donate some meat to a family or two and provide them with quality food, I thought I could greatly increase my impact on the community by turning to customers to help share the costs. I donated time, logistical planning, and some monetary value in the form of reducing the cost of the bundles slated for giveaway. I then posted the bundles for sell on the website and you guys did the rest!

While handling meat packaging and delivery is commonplace for me, identifying families most in need of bundles and distributing them is admittedly outside my wheelhouse. To solve that problem, I turned to Shelia Foster. Shelia is the Director of the Meade County Angel Ministry. They do work for our community throughout the year, but are perhaps best known for the Angel Tree program that provides Christmas gifts for children.

Since participants in that program have some overlap with the families I intend for the meat bundles to go to, Sheila is going to distribute the bundles Sunday, December 18th from our Meat Wagon trailer at the Angel Tree pickup to families she has selected.

When I created the giveaway bundle product on the website and sent an email about it to our mailing list, I wasn't sure what to expect. I thought that perhaps some of our most dedicated customers and some personal friends and family would purchase one, but I was blown away by the response!

We were able to sell 42 bundles by the time of this blog publishing. (if you'd like to help us get to 50 before tomorrow, click here) The purchases by customers represent an actual dollar value of $1260 and nearly $1600 worth of products at current retail prices.

Among the many contributors a few stood out. I'd like to send a special thank you to Tony Brown Chevrolet, who purchased a double digit number of bundles! They did so without any solicitation (except being on our mailing list) and without any promise of any publicity or advertising from their donation. It's great to see another local business looking out for the community they operate in!

Another surprise was that we had more than one bundle purchased from out of state. These bundles were purchased by email subscribers that were blog readers that do not live in our community and have never even been here! That is fantastic and inspiring.

We had another customer that bought a bundle as soon as they were posted to the website and then returned a few days later and bought more. We appreciate their willingness to help their community and appreciate their trust in us to properly utilize their purchase.

I am grateful to all of you for the support you've shown the farm throughout this year and I'm grateful for the kindness and generosity you've shown our community in supporting this effort to make Christmas a little better for some families who could use the help.

Merry Christmas,

Phillip