A Day Selling Vegetables: How Much Do You Actually Learn?
Over a year ago, the entire Foodthink team “took over” a community produce shop run by the Beijing Organic Farmers’ Market. For a single day, we handled every aspect of the shop’s operations, delivered impressive sales figures, won our “wager,” and successfully completed the first ever “Occupy the Shop” mission! Despite our usual seriousness, we even filmed a lighthearted reality-style short video (head to Foodthink’s WeChat Channels to watch it) to document this special day.
A year later, Foodthink welcomed several new colleagues. As younger-generation consumers, they know the online grocery-shopping process inside out but are completely unfamiliar with food retail—especially the final stage of selling eco-friendly smallholder produce. Armed with the patchy knowledge shared by our veteran staff from last year’s takeover, we “occupied the shop” again just before the Lunar New Year (Year of the Dragon). The goal was twofold: to help our trusted farming friends sell their New Year provisions, and to guide our readers and customers in selecting theirs. Most importantly, it was a chance to experience firsthand a vital component of the food-farming system—consumption—and to see how it influences other stages like production and distribution.
How did the second “Market Takeover” go?
Let’s look at our team’s reflections.
1. Turns Out Selling Vegetables Is a Knowledge-Intensive Job
Role during Market Takeover:
Stocking shelves, greeting customers, processing online orders
“Miss, whose persimmons are these?” At midday, two customers stood before the tomatoes delivered by Snail Farm and asked.
I paused for a moment, then replied, “They’re from Snail Farm. But those aren’t persimmons, they’re tomatoes.”
The customers gave me a look, said no more, picked out a few tomatoes, and left.
A short while later, the official shop manager, Xiao P, came by to check on progress. I tried to lighten the mood with a joke: “A customer just called tomatoes ‘persimmons’, so I corrected her.”
Xiao P kept a straight face. “We call tomatoes ‘persimmons’ here.”
“What?” I felt a bit awkward and completely baffled. “Then what do you call proper persimmons?”
“We call them ‘persimmons’ too,” she said with a smile.
There it was: Xiao P, a native of Hebei, giving her first lesson in regional culture to a newly hired shop assistant from Hainan.
In the afternoon, a Mr Zheng called to order some vegetables. “I’d like carrots, cauliflower, wu-ta cabbage, daikon radish, Chinese cabbage….”
He spoke fluently, and I nervously jotted down: “Car-”, “Cauli-”, “Wu?” “White-”, “Big-”…
The rest was fine, but what on earth was “wu” something cabbage? I didn’t catch it, so I steeled myself to ask again.
“Sorry, the signal dropped and I didn’t quite catch that. Wu… what cabbage?” I blamed the poor connection.
“Wu-ta cabbage.” Mr Zheng repeated.
Ugh! I still had no idea. I’d just pretend I knew and muddle through: “Oh, right! Let me check if I have it in stock. I’ll get your other vegetables ready first and send you the WeChat bill in a moment.”
After hanging up, I muttered to Little P: “This Mr Zheng also asked for some kind of ‘wu’ cabbage. I haven’t seen any in stock.”
A lightbulb seemed to switch on in Little P’s head: “Black cabbage! We’ve got plenty!” She casually handed me a bag.
“Wu—ta—cai!”
It seems you really can’t sell quality vegetables without a bit of botanical grounding!
2. How can you possibly sell non-standardised vegetables efficiently?
Role at the Occupy Community Hub:
Processing online orders, hosting tea gatherings featuring fermentation films
Although there was a farmers’ market on the shopping street just outside the hub on the opening day, with growers setting up their own stalls stocked with their freshest produce, most shoppers were still accustomed to buying online. The hub had to set up a WeChat ordering service for vegetables.
By the end of the day, the heaviest workload came down to managing WeChat customer service and processing every order that came through. We had to photograph the fresh vegetables delivered by growers the moment they arrived and share them on WeChat Moments and in our customers’ group chats, so everyone knew what was available to buy that day.
‘Is this today’s fresh batch? I want what just arrived today.’
‘Macadamia nuts, not roasted too dark.’
‘One white radish, not too large.’
‘Some carrots.’
‘Could you help me put together a selection of vegetables?’
…
Phrases like ‘not too big’, ‘a bit’, or ‘some’ leave me in a quandary. Handing out too little risks it being insufficient; too much, and I worry they might think I’m padding the order or pushing unnecessary items. I have to carefully weigh every request. Little P, who has worked at the community space for six or seven years, knows this all too well and helps translate vague requests into concrete measures: ‘a bag’, ‘two stalks’, ‘half a jin’, ‘one jin’.
Fresh, flawless – that is the online customer’s expectation for produce, and I am no different.
Previously, when I bought vegetables on e-commerce apps, they all seemed to be roughly the same size. If a potato came in a different colour, I suspected the seller was trying to pass off poor quality stock. Sweet potatoes were always washed clean before bagging. After a day of selling at the community space, I realised that onions naturally vary in size, potatoes come in several colours, and sweet potatoes with a bit of soil on them are completely normal. We have forgotten what food actually looks like in its natural state. It is much like how people differ in height, or how eyes, beyond black, can be brown, grey, blue, or green.
Yet, speed and accuracy remain the online customer’s expectation for service. In a society that endlessly pursues efficiency, even agricultural products that naturally vary in form are demanded to be ‘standardised’, inevitably leading to the industrialisation of farming. When e-commerce platforms tout a ‘click-order-to-doorbell-ringing’ turnaround, I truly hope online customers can offer shops a little more patience and understanding, and extend greater appreciation to farmers and the land itself.
Once my day as a novice clerk came to an end, I really wanted to tell the e-commerce pickers and delivery riders: ‘It’s alright, I’m not in a rush, take your time.’ But can they actually slow down just because I am not in a hurry?
III. The Professional Who Faced the Sharpest Pushback
Picking online orders, and taking a break to chat with the farmers
Having studied agronomy for six years at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, specialising in ecological agriculture, I may not be entirely unfamiliar with basic crops. Yet, I found myself struggling to keep up with customer questions because I could not accurately name different varieties of leafy greens or clearly explain the taste profiles of each cultivar.
To escape the awkwardness, I decided to strike up conversations with the fellow growers, hoping to regain a little confidence in a domain I knew.
Wang Xin from Xiqing Farm was already enthusiastically outlining his rapeseed plans: “As soon as spring arrives, the rapeseeds will be ready for harvest.”
I couldn’t help but interject: “Hold on, can rapeseed actually set seed here in Beijing by spring?”
Wang Xin paused, taken aback, before a heavy silence fell.
I pressed on: “Are rapeseed and mustard seed related? They look remarkably alike.”
He looked at me with sheer bewilderment. “Are you sure you actually studied agriculture?”
This is hardly the first time I’ve faced questioning from the farmers. I still vaguely recall not being a poor student back in my academic days, believing myself familiar with the rhythms of plant growth. I had actively participated in practical training at various farms, from China all the way to the Netherlands, and could recite crop nutrient stages, the mechanisms of action of different herbicides, and even the Latin names of field pests off the top of my head. Yet, every time I chatted with the farmers, I couldn’t help but feel out of my depth. Stepping into a vegetable shop I hardly knew was like a novice wandering into a village of seasoned veterans.
Having spent so long away from the soil, it seems I’ve also forgotten the seasons in which crops grow.
I remember the professors at the College of Agriculture always humbly admitting that they weren’t as adept at farming as the actual growers. The gap between theory and practice is always plain to see. How much value, then, do those textbook facts once committed to memory, and the models and data meticulously built up on screens, truly hold in the reality of the fields?
For over three months now, working at Foodthink, every visit to a farm and every conversation with a farmer has felt like attending an alternative agricultural school. It makes me wonder: how close to the land does one need to be to truly understand and respect farming, along with the people who work it so diligently?
IV. Counting the Goods of Over Twenty Farming Friends in a Single Day
The first time I worked at “Zhanling Jishi”, I was on the till. Although sales were strong, I was told I had made quite a few errors. This time, the shop sent in Xiao P to oversee cash handling, so I was assigned to receiving and putting stock away.
On the day of the event, a New Year market was also taking place outside the store. The farming friends who came to sell arrived first thing in the morning with their produce. Beyond the meat, vegetables, and eggs from growers around Beijing, the shop’s other ingredients came from dozens of different ecological smallholders nationwide – dried goods, fruit, coarse grains, snacks – all relying on courier delivery. With the New Year approaching at the end of January and couriers preparing to suspend services, the shop needed to stock up on festival provisions for everyone. Consequently, deliveries started arriving in boxes from all across the country.
Over the course of this 12-hour shift, I spent at least three hours unpacking deliveries, checking quantities, filling in stock-in forms, and putting goods on the shelves. P was also baffled: how had everything ordered over the past week arrived on the very same day?
I carefully unboxed and arranged the various New Year treats sent by our farming partners from across the country – eight-treasure rice, sticky rice cakes, peanut candy, almond pastries, mountain walnut kernels, and more. I felt quietly pleased: at least we wouldn’t be short of good food for the festival.
Receiving the stock, however, was no light task. The farmers didn’t ship their goods in standard cartons, so what looked like a simple line on the stock-in form – 55 packs of dried sweet potato, 50 portions of eight-treasure rice (25 plain, 25 purple rice) – could take an age to tally. Someone even made a meme about it.
After a full day of work, I checked the counts and realised I’d written up 20 stock-in forms. Although the variety was high, the quantity of each item was actually quite modest compared to a supermarket. The day’s new arrivals were a jumbled mix of fifty or sixty different things – a little bit from one farm, a little from another. Just for sweet potatoes, we had seven or eight varieties from four or five different growers. Without some experience, it’s easy to get hopelessly confused. The volumes for many products were also very small, which reduced the counting workload, but each still required its own receiving note: Xiqing Farm only sent two cauliflowers, one large and one small, as that was all they could find in their fields.
From a commercial standpoint, liaising with smallholders like this is thoroughly inefficient. Yet perhaps that is precisely the point of Jishi’s commitment to working with small-scale farmers.
V.“I’m the one actually selling vegetables!”
For this Market Takeover, my task was to write ‘Fu’ characters at the farmers’ market outside the shop and hand them out to shoppers. Whenever I had a spare moment, I’d also help my herder friend Suhe at the neighbouring stall hawk his mutton.
“These sheep are free-range on the herders’ own pastures in East Ujimqin Banner, Xilin Gol League. They graze on grass only, with no supplementary feed, and are absolutely delicious!” Having been lucky enough to attend two “origin visits,” I enthusiastically pitched them to passersby. However, sales were underwhelming; only a colleague who dropped by to check on me bought a box of mutton slices to show support.
Compared with colleagues handling stock and manning tills in our shop, the outdoor market carries a much stronger “selling produce” atmosphere, requiring growers to take the initiative in striking up conversations and drawing in customers. For Sunday’s market, we specially invited the young herder Suhe to perform throat singing—truly an elaborate pitch for lamb! Those who came to watch were left in awe, yet nobody bought any lamb. Even those who paused rarely asked about the lamb’s distinctive qualities or how to prepare it; indeed, no one even questioned the higher price. It seems our most treasured farming practices may well fall to the very edge of consumer interest.
How do you capture a steady stream of passing footfall? How do you introduce growers and their products to consumers entirely unfamiliar with ecological agriculture? And how do you address customer scepticism? Having occupied a market stall once before, I thought I knew the ropes, only to discover that selling produce is genuinely a complex craft, and doing so with a mission makes it all the harder.
VI. It’s Truly About More Than Just Selling Produce
Role for the ‘Occupying the Collective Room’ event: Reception
Bringing Foodthink to “occupy the collective room” feels a bit like a counter-attack. After all, I helped launch the space, and there was a time when I’d spend every day in the shop, pitching in wherever needed. But since founding Foodthink in 2017, I’ve spent less time here, grown a bit rusty with the daily routine, and even lost my nerve at the till.
Each “occupy the collective room” event is one of the few occasions I spend a full day in the shop. It’s a pleasure to see it evolving into the vision we held when we first created it: a space that brings together good food, meaningful activities, and wonderful people.
On event days, the morning sees the collective room bustling with the receiving and selling of vegetables, while outside, our farming partners run a New Year produce market. By lunchtime, the farmer on cooking duty serves a meal for thirty, with all ingredients generously contributed by the group.
In the afternoon, Foodthink invited a few friends to screen two fermentation-themed documentaries we had produced and translated. While watching, everyone savoured some fermented treats: a warm bowl of fermented rice wine soup and French cheese from Bule.
In the evening, friends from the Farmers’ Seed Network and Professor Qiao Yuhui from China Agricultural University also dropped by. Together with our market regulars and fellow growers, we enjoyed a cheese and flatbread buffet from the Small Farmer’s Table. Naturally, all the ingredients came from the ecological smallholders at the market.
It is rare to find a vegetable shop quite like this anywhere in the world. Housed in a modest space in the heart of a bustling city, it brings together produce from ecological smallholders across the country, showcases practical approaches to sustainable food systems from around the globe, draws in stakeholders who share a passion for these issues, and offers the chance to taste exceptional, ecologically grown ingredients right on site.
Yet all of this rests upon a solid foundation: the steadfast labour of every farmer tending the land, the day-to-day, meticulous efforts of each colleague at Jishi, and every consumer casting their vote for the kind of world they wish to see.
On Chinese New Year’s Eve this year (9 February 2023, 10:00–18:00), I will be working a shift alongside Xiaochao, co-founder of Jishi, at our store in Li Xiang, Sanyuanqiao. We’ll be on duty to serve you on the final day of the Year of the Rabbit. If you are celebrating the New Year in Beijing, please do pop in to browse our vegetables and pick up your festive provisions.
Scan the QR code on the poster below to hear our colleagues at Foodthink share a mix of popular and lesser-known insights about selling vegetables:
Wishing
everyone
an
early
Happy
New
Year
Happy New Year
Coordinated by: Ning Chen & Mei Ying
Photography: Ling Ge & Foodthink
Edited by: Tianle