Selling vegetables for a day: how many surprising facts can you uncover?
Over a year ago, the entire Foodthink team “usurped the nest“, taking over the community vegetable shop of the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market. In a single day, we took full responsibility for all shop operations and achieved such great sales results that we won our “wager”. The first “Occupy the Market Room” was a success! Usually a serious bunch, we even filmed a variety-show style reality short (check the Foodthink video account for the clip) to document this unusual day.
One year later, Foodthink welcomed several new colleagues. As part of the younger generation of consumers, they are well-versed in the entire process of online grocery shopping, yet they knew nothing about food retail—especially the final link in the sale of ingredients from ecological small-scale farmers. Armed with the fragmented knowledge of the veterans from last year, we “occupied the market room” once again before the Lunar New Year. We helped our familiar farmers sell their festive goods and helped our readers and consumers select them. More importantly, we experienced a critical part of the food-and-agriculture system—consumption—and how it influences other stages like production and distribution.
How did the second “Occupy the Market Room” go?
Let’s look at our colleagues’ debriefs.
1. As it turns out, selling vegetables is a knowledge-intensive profession
Stocking, greeting customers, handling online orders
“Young lady, who grew this persimmon?” asked two customers in the middle of the day, gesturing towards the tomatoes delivered by Snail Farm.
I paused for a moment and replied, “These are from Snail Farm. But these aren’t persimmons; they’re tomatoes.”
The customers glanced at me without saying much, picked a few tomatoes, and left.
Shortly after, the actual shop manager, Xiao P, came to check on the work. I tried to tell her a joke: “A customer just called the tomatoes ‘persimmons’, so I corrected her.”
Xiao P remained expressionless. “Around here, we just call tomatoes ‘persimmons’.”
“What?” I was embarrassed and utterly confused. “Then what do you call actual persimmons?”
“Persimmons,” she said with a smile.
This was the first lesson in regional culture that Xiao P, from Hebei, gave to the novice shop assistant from Hainan.
In the afternoon, a Mr Zheng called to order vegetables. “I’ll take carrots, cauliflower, Utacai, white radish, Chinese cabbage…”
He spoke fluently, and I frantically scribbled in my notebook: “Carrot”, “Cauli”, “U-what?”, “White r…”, “Big white”…
Everything else was fine, but what on earth was this “U-something” vegetable? I didn’t understand, but I plucked up the courage to ask again.
“Sorry, the signal was a bit poor, I didn’t quite catch that. U-what vegetable?” I blamed the network.
“Utacai,” Mr Zheng repeated.
Ahhh! I still didn’t get it, so I pretended I did to get through the call: “Oh, I see! I’ll check if we have any in a moment. Let me gather the other vegetables for you first, and I’ll send the WeChat bill over shortly.”
After hanging up, I whispered to Xiao P, “This Mr Zheng wanted some ‘U-something’ vegetable, but I couldn’t find any.”
It was as if Xiao P’s mind suddenly clicked: “Utacai! Of course we have that!” She handed me a bag.
“U—ta—cai!”
It seems that without a bit of a botanical background, you really can’t sell vegetables well!
2. How can you sell efficiently when the produce can’t be standardised?
Handling online orders, hosting fermentation film and tea gatherings
Although a farmers’ market was happening on the shopping street outside the Market Room on the day, with farmers bringing their freshest produce to their own stalls, most consumers were still used to shopping online. Consequently, the Market Room had to provide a WeChat ordering and shopping service.
So, throughout the day, the heaviest workload was acting as the WeChat customer service agent and processing every customer’s order. We had to photograph newly delivered vegetables as quickly as possible and post them to our WeChat Moments and customer groups, so people knew what was available that day.
“Is this fresh from today? I only want what arrived today.”
“Don’t let the macadamias be too burnt.”
“One white radish, please—not too large.”
“I’ll take some carrots.”
“Could you put a selection of vegetables together for me?”
……
Phrases like “not too large”, “some”, and “a bit” left me stumped. If I gave too little, I feared it wouldn’t be enough; too much, and I worried the customer would think I was trying to push stock on them. I had to weigh every single request with extreme caution. Xiao P, who has worked in the collection room for six or seven years, was well-versed in this. He helped me “translate” these ambiguous needs into concrete terms like “one bag”, “two stalks”, “250g”, or “half a kilo”.
Freshness and flawlessness are what online customers expect from their produce, and I was no exception.
When I used to buy vegetables via e-commerce apps, they always seemed to be uniform in size. If a potato had a different colour, I’d assume the merchant was cutting corners. Sweet potatoes always arrived cleaned before being bagged. After a day of selling in the collection room, I realised that onions come in various sizes, potatoes have several different colours, and it’s perfectly normal for sweet potatoes to be covered in soil. We have forgotten what food actually looks like. It is just like how people vary in height, or how eyes can be brown, grey, blue, or green, and not just black.
However, speed and accuracy are what online customers expect from the service. In a society obsessed with efficiency, agricultural products—which are naturally diverse—are required to be “standardised”, leading inevitably to the industrialisation of agriculture. While e-commerce platforms promote the speed of “press order = doorbell rings”, I truly hope online customers can show shopkeepers more patience and tolerance, and offer more understanding to the farmers and the land.
As my one-day transformation into a novice shop assistant came to an end, I really wanted to tell the pickers and delivery riders: “It’s okay, I’m in no rush, take your time.” But if I am the only one who isn’t in a rush, can they actually afford to slow down?
III. The Most Roasted Professional
picking online orders, and chatting idly with farmers.
I spent six years studying agronomy through my undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, specialising in ecological agriculture. While I’m not completely clueless about crops, I found myself overwhelmed by customer questions simply because I couldn’t accurately name every type of leafy green or describe the subtle taste differences between varieties.
Consequently, I decided to escape these awkward moments by chatting with the farmers, hoping to regain some confidence in a field I was more familiar with.
Wang Xin from Xiqing Farm was talking enthusiastically about his rapeseed planting plan: “Once spring arrives, the rapeseed can be harvested.”
I couldn’t help but interject: “Wait, rapeseed in Beijing sets seed in the spring?”
Wang Xin paused, followed by a moment of silence.
I continued: “Are rapeseed and mustard seeds related? They look so similar.”
His eyes were filled with confusion: “Did you actually study agriculture?”
This wasn’t the first time I had faced scepticism from a farmer. I recall not being a poor student back in university; I believed I was well-acquainted with the laws of plant growth and had actively participated in production practices at various farms from China to the Netherlands. I could recite nutrient nodes, the mechanisms of various herbicides, and even the Latin names of field pests by heart. Yet, whenever I chatted with farmers, I couldn’t help but feel out of my depth. Entering this unfamiliar vegetable shop felt like a complete amateur walking into a village of veterans.
Having been distanced from the land for so long, it seems I had also forgotten the seasonality of crop growth.
I remember my professors at the agricultural college always humbly admitting that they couldn’t farm as well as the peasants; the gap between theory and practice was always self-evident. How much of the knowledge I had mastered from textbooks, or the models and data I had meticulously constructed in front of a screen, actually plays a role in a real field?
Working at Foodthink for over three months, every visit to a farm and every conversation with a farmer feels like attending a different kind of agricultural college. I cannot help but ask myself: how close must one be to the land to truly understand and respect agriculture, and the hardworking people who toil upon it?
IV. Counting goods for over 20 farmer-friends in a day
During my first ‘takeover’ of the Collective Room, I was in charge of the till. While my sales figures were decent, I hear I made quite a few blunders. This time, Xiao P was sent to oversee the checkout, so I was assigned to receiving and stock entry.
On the day of the takeover, the Lunar New Year market happened to be taking place right outside the shop, and the farmer-friends arrived early in the morning to drop off their produce. Aside from the meat, vegetables, and eggs brought in by farmers from around Beijing, the Collective Room’s other ingredients came from dozens of different ecological small-scale farmers across the country—dried goods, fruit, grains, snacks—all arriving via courier. As January drew to a close and the Spring Festival approached, couriers were about to stop operating, but the Collective Room needed to stock up on festive supplies for everyone. Consequently, crates began flying in from every corner of the country.
During that 12-hour shift, I spent at least three hours unboxing parcels, verifying quantities, filling out delivery notes, and shelving stock. Xiao P was also baffled as to why everything ordered over the previous week had arrived on the very same day.
I spent my time unboxing and shelving various festive delicacies sent by farmers from all over—eight-treasure rice, rice cakes, peanut brittle, peach cookies, pecan kernels, and more. I felt quite satisfied; there was certainly no shortage of treats for the New Year.
However, receiving goods is no easy feat. The farmers didn’t use standardised boxes, so when a delivery note simply listed ’55 bags of dried sweet potato’ or ’50 eight-treasure rice (25 white rice and 25 purple rice)’, verifying the count was exhausting. Someone even made a meme about it.
By the time I finished checking everything in the evening, I had written 20 delivery notes. Despite the variety, the quantity of each item was relatively small compared to a supermarket. There were about fifty or sixty different types of new arrivals that day—a little bit from this farm, a little bit from that one. There were seven or eight varieties of sweet potato from four or five different farmers; without a bit of experience, it was genuinely confusing. Some products came in tiny quantities; while the counting was quick, they still required separate stock entry forms: Xiqing Farm sent only two cauliflowers—one large and one small—the only two they could find in the field.
From a commercial standpoint, coordinating with such small-scale farmers is completely inefficient. But perhaps that is exactly where the meaning of the Collective Room’s commitment to small farmers lies.
V. “I’m the one who’s actually selling vegetables!”
During this takeover, my responsibility was to write ‘Fu’ characters (symbolising good fortune) at the outdoor farmers’ market to give away to shoppers. In my spare time, I also helped Suhe, a herder from the neighbouring stall, shout out to attract customers for his mutton.
“These sheep are free-range from a family pasture in East Ujimqin Banner, Xilingol League. They only eat grass, no feed, so the meat is incredibly fragrant!” I enthusiastically explained to passers-by, drawing on my experience from two ‘origin visits’. However, the sales impact was underwhelming; only a few colleagues visiting the stall bought a box of sliced mutton out of friendship.
Compared to the colleagues handling stock and the till inside the shop, the outdoor market had a much stronger ‘selling veg’ atmosphere; it required farmers to be more proactive in starting conversations and drumming up business. For the Sunday market, we specifically invited the young herder Suhe to perform Khoomei throat singing—it was practically a theatrical way to sell mutton! The customers who stopped to watch were amazed, yet still, nobody bought any mutton. The few who did linger rarely asked about the characteristics or preparation of the meat, and no one even asked why it was so expensive. The production methods we are most proud of perhaps fall at the very periphery of what consumers actually care about.
How do you capture the attention of the passing crowd? How do you introduce farmers and their produce to consumers who know nothing about ecological agriculture? How do you answer their doubts? Having previously taken over the Collective Room once, I thought I’d be a seasoned pro, but I soon realised that selling vegetables is truly an art, and selling them with a philosophy is even harder.
VI. Actually, it’s about more than just selling vegetables
Convener of the Beijing Organic Farmers Market
History: Longer than anyone else’s
Role in ‘Taking Over the Market Room’: Reception
Bringing Foodthink to ‘take over the market room’ felt almost like a ‘counter-offensive’. After all, I was part of the market room’s inception; there was a time when I spent every day in the shop, doing whatever needed to be done. But since founding Foodthink in 2017, I’ve spent less time here, my skills have grown rusty, and I’ve even become a bit hesitant to handle the till.
Each ‘takeover’ event is one of the few times I spend an entire day in the shop. It makes me happy to see it evolving closer to what we wished for when we first created it: a space that brings together beautiful food, things, and people.
Throughout the day: in the morning, the market room was a flurry of receiving and selling produce, while outside, the farmers held their New Year’s market. At midday, the farmer on cooking duty served a lunch enough for 30 people, with ingredients sourced from everyone there.
In the afternoon, Foodthink invited some partners to watch two documentaries on fermentation that we produced and translated. We sampled fermented foods while watching: warm fermented glutinous rice soup and Bule’s French cheese.
In the evening, partners from the Farmers’ Seed Network and Professor Qiao Yuhui from China Agricultural University came to visit. Together with the market visitors and farmers, we enjoyed a cheese pancake buffet from the Small Farmers’ Table—the ingredients, of course, coming from the ecological smallholders of the market room.
There are perhaps very few shops like this in the world: a modest space in the bustling heart of a metropolis that houses products from ecological smallholders across the country, showcases sustainable food system practices from around the globe, attracts stakeholders concerned with these issues, and allows one to eat delicious ecological produce directly.
But the foundation of all this is the diligent toil of every farmer on their land, the meticulous and repetitive daily work of every colleague in the market room, and every consumer voting for the world they want to live in.
On New Year’s Eve this year, 9 February 2023, from 10:00 to 18:00, I will be on duty at the market room in Sanyuanqiao Lixiang alongside Xiao Chao, who also helped found it. We’ll be there to serve you on the final day of the Year of the Rabbit. Readers spending the New Year in Beijing are welcome to come and buy vegetables and New Year’s supplies.
Scan the QR code on the poster below to hear the Foodthink team chat about the practical and trivial knowledge of selling vegetables:
Wishing
everyone
an
early
Happy
New
Year
Happy Lunar New Year
Coordination: Ning Chen, Mei Ying
Photography: Ling Ge, Foodthink
Editing: Tianle