As businesses pivot, indoor gardens find success selling direct-to-consumers
Photo courtesy of Anchorage Greens.
Two sister businesses with differing business models have been adapting amidst the pandemic, providing produce for their customers while practicing social distancing.
Rachael Posey is the business manager at Anchorage Greens. Her brother, Trevor Kirchhoff, is one of the co-owners.
Anchorage Greens opened in 2019 with its first crops ready to harvest in November. They moved their model to curbside pickup, with no customers admitted to their 73rd Avenue location. Kirchhoff and their mother are the only two people currently working in the garden.
All orders are processed over the phone; they are no longer processing cash or card payments to lessen the risk of exposure. If customers want to add something onto their order, they will simply be processed the following week.
Posey says in her industry, keeping customers engaged while increasing capacity is a challenge.
“You have that big lag time between when you plant and when you can harvest,” Posey said. “Even in January when there was an article in the [Anchorage Daily News]... now all these people are interested, and we needed to plant more seven weeks ago.”
Being a new business presents its own set of challenges, but the added stress of owning a business amid a pandemic has added new questions. Anchorage Greens recently started growing lettuce for an Anchorage establishment, but restaurant closures only allowed the collaboration for a week or so. Fortunately, Posey says they have been able to “re-purpose” the lettuce and sell it directly to consumers.
While Posey says business has been steady, Anchorage Greens’ sister-business, Juneau Greens, has had to quickly adapt, given that about 30 percent of their business prior to the pandemic was servicing local restaurants.
“Juneau Greens has a slightly different model in terms of — they do more sales through the grocery stores,” Posey said. “They sell living basil plants in grocery stores, and then also they had a big restaurant presence. They’ve been impacted in some ways, more, because of the restaurant shut down and things. They have been having to pivot a little more in Juneau.”
Kirchhoff and co-owner John Krapek founded Juneau Greens in 2017. They expanded to Anchorage after finding success in Southeast. Krapek says the pandemic has caused them to make some serious adaptations selling their produce, but two local organizations have helped make that happen — Panhandle Produce and Salt & Soil Marketplace.
“[Panhandle Produce has] been selling our stuff for a while, but we just tried to package our produce in different ways and come up with different salad mixes and farmers choice bags where we could just put a bunch of different items that we were growing for the restaurants in the bags and sell them there,” Krapek said.
Panhandle Produce is offering curbside pickup and delivery for orders, while Salt & Soil has a fully online portal — patrons can order and have their fresh food delivered to their door.
“People are wanting to know where their food comes from,” Krapek said. “Even though the first couple weeks of the restaurant closures were really frustrating and a little bit scary, we’re also trying to look at it as an opportunity — a way to reach new customers and have more people find out about our business.”
Krapek says through both venues, Juneau Greens has been able to sell the majority of its restaurant produce.
“We’ll still have some excess butter lettuce — that’s really the only thing we’ve had extra of,” Krapek said. “We’ve been able to pretty easily move all the other stuff. Even the butter lettuce, we’ve been able to sell, I’d say 90 percent of it. Every now and then, we’ll take some home or donate it to the food bank.”