Farm shop & Tea Room

elsien

Cake at a price that you don't need a small mortgage to buy it. Or the option to have a smaller cheaper piece. I object to paying a few quid a slice then wasting half because it's more than I want. Which is why, even when I'm eying cake up longingly I tend not to buy it.
Farm shop - locally sourced meat and info as to where it's come from. Too many people telling porkies about provenance.

TeaRoomVenture

Owain_Moneysaver wrote: »

Is the target market local people who want freshly harvested tatties with the soil still on, or coach parties stopping for a tea-n-pee break who'll maybe buy a souvenir jar of home-made jam?

Local people indeed but we'd like to extend, so a bit of marketing should be done but we need to be able to accommodate and cater for the flow of it's coming!!! There isn't any coach party coming this way so no big Ben keyrings needed!!!!

TeaRoomVenture

elsien wrote: »

Cake at a price that you don't need a small mortgage to buy it. Or the option to have a smaller cheaper piece. I object to paying a few quid a slice then wasting half because it's more than I want. Which is why, even when I'm eying cake up longingly I tend not to buy it.
Farm shop - locally sourced meat and info as to where it's come from. Too many people telling porkies about provenance.

You have fair comments indeed about the provenance of the produce, it is not currently provided which is a shame I think. I would expect it as a customer so we intend to write it on the price tags!
Portion control is a point taken too! Thank you very much!

greenbee

You don't need to write the provenance on the price tags - that's a lot of work. I remember going to a lovely butcher somewhere which had the details of where the meat had come from up on a blackboard. That will allow you to update as and when things change.

E.g. Beef - manor farm, lamb - home farm, potatoes - Fred's smallholding, cakes - Mrs Blogs etc...

With allergens you could use a code system, and ask your suppliers to flag them up so that everyone knows that a red dot is gluten, blue is dairy, yellow is egg etc, brown is nuts etc.

Try to make things as simple for you (and your customers) as possible.

paddyrg

If a place calls itself a farm shop, I expect a sizeable portion of the produce to be from that farm, otherwise I may as well go to a grocer with higher turnover for fresher produce if it's just from the wholesaler. Cake must be home made. Menu can be simple but centered around fresh and local.

You should also look at how to keep friendly animals in fields next to the tea garden, that's something I'll return for.

TeaRoomVenture

greenbee wrote: »

You don't need to write the provenance on the price tags - that's a lot of work. I remember going to a lovely butcher somewhere which had the details of where the meat had come from up on a blackboard. That will allow you to update as and when things change.

E.g. Beef - manor farm, lamb - home farm, potatoes - Fred's smallholding, cakes - Mrs Blogs etc...

With allergens you could use a code system, and ask your suppliers to flag them up so that everyone knows that a red dot is gluten, blue is dairy, yellow is egg etc, brown is nuts etc.

Try to make things as simple for you (and your customers) as possible.

Love the idea of colour coding the produce, great idea!
You're totally right it has to be simple and easily comprehensible.
Board with provenance is perfect too actually!
Thank you very much for your input 😉👍

TeaRoomVenture

paddyrg wrote: »

If a place calls itself a farm shop, I expect a sizeable portion of the produce to be from that farm, otherwise I may as well go to a grocer with higher turnover for fresher produce if it's just from the wholesaler. Cake must be home made. Menu can be simple but centered around fresh and local.

You should also look at how to keep friendly animals in fields next to the tea garden, that's something I'll return for.

Fair enough and so do we! Farm shop means local produce to me! It has to have a crafty feel to it. Cakes are already home made by a local baker and the bread comes from a multiple award winning bakery too so good stuff!
We also want to set up a little petting zoo. We are very aware it'll attract kiddies and their parents!
Thanks a lot for your ideas!

Mojisola

TeaRoomVenture wrote: »

We also want to set up a little petting zoo. We are very aware it'll attract kiddies and their parents!

Build in the cost of sinks and signs warning parents about getting their children to wash well - going from petting animals to the food area directly can lead to problems -
http://news.sky.com/story/dozens-fall-sick-after-visiting-petting-farm-10270727

While a bit of regular dirt is healthy, E.coli and cryptosporidiosis aren't good for you.

TeaRoomVenture

Mojisola wrote: »

Build in the cost of sinks and signs warning parents about getting their children to wash well - going from petting animals to the food area directly can lead to problems -

While a bit of regular dirt is healthy, E.coli and cryptosporidiosis aren't good for you.

Excellent point, we need to put a sink next to it! Or a double fence so children don't actually touch the animals...but it may defeat the object!!! Thanks a lot!

Savvy_Sue

TeaRoomVenture wrote: »

The owners want their life back and are not ready to extend the hours or premises or services to let the business grow, they have already done a lot to it and want to step back and move onto something else.

think very carefully about that, and think through some 'what if' scenarios.

For example, you talk about 'we'. So I'm guessing that's you and your Significant Other. If there are more adults in the 'we', that's probably a good thing. If you have children, you need extra contingencies for childcare.

I mention this as we have friends who, some years ago, were running a CyberCafe in France before everyone had easy access to the internet at home. It all worked very well: Mum or Dad would open up, the other would drop the children at school, one of them could pick the children up and the other could close up. They also had a part-timer to enable them both to carry on with some other paid employment, because the cafe alone wasn't enough to keep a family of four.

Then Mum was seriously ill, in hospital for some weeks. Hospital was more than half an hour in the opposite direction from home to the children's schools, so a quick drop-off became an hour's round trip for visiting.

And at that point, keeping to the advertised opening hours became completely impossible.

One thing with anything retail or catering is that IMO you will lose business if you are not reliably open when you say you will be. Hence the need for lots of contingency planning!

TeaRoomVenture wrote: »

We did visit on different time and days and the flow is coming by peaks in the tea room and sort of steady in the shop.

Hopefully the peaks are regular, and hopefully you can concentrate your staffing so that service in the tea room doesn't suffer.