Absolutely, or if you already have some sort of distribution in place. Non-essential workers have more time on their hands to go to these markets. These markets tend to sell better in wealthier areas to begin with and their customers, faced with fewer options online and at the supermarket, are willing to pay extra. I wonder if the markets in Elmhurst are as flooded with people.
A co-op I used to work for has trouble keeping up with their demand but mostly because they focused on supermarket distribution. It seems that farms with a semblance of a retail presence or trusted brand are doing well (e.g. Central Milling, these stalls). I have little sympathy for certain farms that are suffering right now (e.g. CAFO's). I do worry for the now unemployed workers that are not present in this article, the animals, and those in processing.
A restaurant could sell 10 meals worth for 10 * original_price * 0.5 and make more per order plus use up more ingredients. Farms could sell cheese by 5lb packs, eggs by the dozen dozens, meat by 10lb packs, etc.
It's not worth the whole ordeal of going to a restaurant to get a small portion of food, pay the same price as a sit-down experience, and be hungry again in a few hours.
A lot of people meal prep for the entire week. Restaurants could fill in for that.
Something like https://www.eatclub.com/ but for home, and delivered in bulk.
In frugal times, going to a sit-down restaurant is insanely expensive compared to a good at-home meal. A typical sit-down restaurant is like $60 per person including tip/tax with an appetizer and drink. For that, I can eat all 20 meals for a week if I shop sales.
The first link I found on Google [https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2019/05/16/survey-shows-how-o...] says that almost half of Americans basically never dine out or do take out. Only 10% eat out in any form 4-6 times a week. So there's definitely space for something in between for the home consumer.
Where do you live? We typically pay $30-$40 for a particularly nice night out at our favorite restaurant. Cheaper stuff runs more in the $10-$25 range. And we're in Boston!
Our local restaurants also jumped quickly into selling meal and beverage kits alongside single takeout/delivery meals, and breweries expanded shipping options to serve individual homes. Meat and vegetable farms too, most of which already had the infrastructure through CSAs/farm shares.
So they're just dumping their cheese now at extreme discounts, and are focusing more on their webshop (I'm not entirely sure they even had one before; the webshop could be entirely new), and they donate a lot of cheese to food banks.
They make some amazing, interesting cheeses, and with the discount, they're extremely affordable, so we're ordering cheese from them and sending them to people who could probably use some cheese in their life. It's a nice way to help two people at the same time.
If you know where to look, this crisis offers some great opportunities to learn about local companies and supply chains. Stuff that used to be business-to-business, or have other reliable customers, is now looking for new customers. Of course lots of people have enough trouble of their own to discover this. You need to be flexible to adjust to the crisis, but it's hard to be flexible when you're suffering. So reach out if you can.
How about a link to the web store? I'd buy some.
Their site: https://henriwillig.com/en/
Their webshop: https://cheeseshop.henriwillig.com/en/
They also ship abroad.
My local choose shop is unusually cheap, though. For quality cheese, I don't think these prices are that unusual. Though if that EUR 10 for plain Gouda includes that 40% discount, that would mean it's normally EUR 18 for .4 kg. That is pretty steep.
Admittedly, they then need an entire breeding season to start again, so there clearly are logistical problems to worry about. But the idea of an unending milk supply simply isn't one of them.
https://gordonzola.net/2020/04/02/diary-of-an-essential-work...
It’s just a failing of our supply chain systems. Lots of cheese is sold out on grocery stores in NYC.
As restaurants in NYC and Boston started closing their doors, specialty cheese shops and wholesales distributers that sold artisan local cheeses started simultaneously seeing 50% drops in sales overnight. I started calling cheesemakers around Vermont to learn how the situation was impacting them. My job took a turn, shifting from trying to support best practices for makers in Vermont to trying to ensure that as many makers as can are able to get through the COVID-19 impact without shuttering their businesses.
I try to call a few cheesemakers every day to see how they are doing, and we’re facing a range of challenges. Some are trying to reduce cheese production, so that production doesn’t exceed demand. This means reducing incoming milk quantities, which means diverting milk produced by dairy animals to another buyer (since those animals keep producing milk every day!) or, in some cases, selling animals off. Others are facing stock issues: Limited aging spaces – meaning that if they continue to make cheese and can’t sell it, eventually their aging spaces will fill, and their animals will still continue to make milk … and they will be back to the previously expressed need to reduce incoming milk.
Alongside the production challenges, there are other issues. The gooey, runny, high moisture texture that makes camembert-style cheeses a delight to enjoy also comes with a short shelf life. These cheeses often need to be eaten fairly quickly when they are ripe, or they will quickly deteriorate in quality beyond where one would want to eat or sell them. For those makers who focus on making these softer cheeses – they have inventory that is sitting in aging cellars without its usual consumer audience.
... So to summarize the situation, it’s like this: Imagine we had a three lane highway going into NYC with cheese instead of cars, then two lanes closed down. We have … a massive cheese traffic jam. We (Vermont Cheese) would normally sell hundreds of thousands of pounds of cheese from our mid- and smaller-sized makers over the next four months…and currently we are selling around half (or perhaps less than that) compared to what we’d normally sell. On other words, we have a BIG cheese traffic jam – one that will grow to likely be hundreds of thousands of pounds of cheese if people don’t buy it – or if makers don’t stop making it (and again - the milking animals will keep producing milk ...).
Online sales can only go so far. Some people won't order online, and certain produce and dairy products are not suited to UPS deliveries, especially when the temperature rises. Unless more distant producers can make the long round trip to the NYC and/or work out wider grocery distribution, they're going to suffer.