Selling Vegetables for a Day: How Much Hot and Cold Knowledge Can You Gain?
Over a year ago, the entire Foodthink team A Cuckoo in the Nest“, took over the community vegetable shop at the Beijing Organic Farmers Market. For a full day we ran every single task in the shop, even setting a new sales record and winning the “wager” — Round one of “Occupying Ji Shi”: a success! Usually the serious sort, we even filmed a light-hearted, reality-TV-style short (available on Foodthink’s WeChat Channels) documenting this extraordinary day.
A year later, Foodthink welcomed several new colleagues. As consumers of the younger generation, they knew the ins and outs of buying groceries online, yet knew nothing about the final link in the chain of food retail — especially when it came to selling produce from ecological smallholder farmers. Armed with the half-knowledge carried over from last year’s veteran shopkeepers, we “occupied Ji Shi” once more just before the Spring Festival of the Year of the Dragon, to help the farmers we know sell their New Year produce and to help our readers and customers pick their New Year supplies. More importantly, we wanted to experience first-hand a vital link in the food and farming system — consumption — and how it shapes production, distribution, and everything else.
So how did the second round of “Occupying Ji Shi” go?
Here are our colleagues’ debriefs.
I. Who Knew Selling Vegetables Was a Knowledge-Intensive Trade?
Role at Ji Shi:
Stocking shelves, serving customers, processing online orders
“Excuse me, miss — whose persimmons are these?” It was around lunchtime, and two customers were standing in front of the tomatoes from Snail Farm.
I blinked. “These are from Snail Farm. But these aren’t persimmons — they’re tomatoes.”
The customer glanced at me, said nothing more, picked a few tomatoes, and left.
A little while later, the real shop manager Xiao P came by to check on us. I tried to share a joke: “Just now, a customer was calling tomatoes ‘persimmons’ and I corrected her.”
Xiao P stared blankly. “Where I’m from, we just call tomatoes ‘persimmons’.”
“What?” I felt a little awkward, and utterly bewildered. “Then what do you call actual persimmons?”
“Also ‘persimmons’,” she said with a smile.
That was the first lesson in regional dialect that Hebei-born Xiao P gave to a newbie shop assistant from Hainan.
In the afternoon, a Mr Zheng rang up to order vegetables. “I’d like carrots, cauliflower, wutai cai, white radish, Napa cabbage…”
He rattled it all off so fluently that I scribbled down, nervous: “car-“, “cau-“, “wu?” “wh-rad”, “Napa”…
Everything else was fine, but this “wu-what” vegetable — I hadn’t a clue. I steeled myself and asked again.
“Sorry, the signal was bad and I missed that — wu what vegetable?” I blamed the poor connection.
“Wutai cai,” Mr Zheng repeated.
Aaaah! I still couldn’t make sense of it. Time to fake it and bluff my way through. “Oh, right! I’ll check if we have some. I’ll set aside the other items for you first, and I’ll send the WeChat invoice across shortly.”
Once I hung up, I muttered to Xiao P: “This Mr Zheng also wants a ‘wu-what-cai’ — I can’t see it anywhere.”
Something clicked in Xiao P’s brain. “Wutai cai! Of course we have it!” She reached over and grabbed a packet for me.
“Wu — ta — cai!”
Seems you really need a background in botany if you want to sell vegetables well!
II. How Can You Efficiently Sell Vegetables That Refuse to Be Standardised?
Role at Ji Shi:
Processing online orders, hosting the Fermentation & Film Tea Gathering
Although on the day we took over, the Farmers Market was set up right on the commercial street outside Ji Shi — farmers out at their stalls with the freshest produce they could grow — most customers still prefer to shop online. Ji Shi has had to set up a WeChat ordering service for their convenience.
So by the end of the day, the heaviest workload was being the WeChat customer service rep, processing every single customer’s order through messages. The moment new vegetables arrived from the farmers, we had to photograph them and post to Moments and the customer WeChat groups, so everyone knew what was on offer that day.
“Is this fresh stock? I want today’s delivery.”
“No burnt macadamia nuts, please.”
“One white radish — not too big.”
“A few carrots, please.”
“Just put a selection together for me, would you?”
……
“Not too big”, “a few”, “some” — these words sent me into a spiral. Give too little and I worry it won’t be enough; give too much and I worry the customer might think I’m ramming extra items down their throat. Every request made me pause and weigh the answer carefully. Xiao P, who has worked at Ji Shi for six or seven years, knew the drill and translated these fuzzy requests for me into specifics: “a bag”, “two”, “half a jin”, “one jin”.
Freshness and flawlessness — that is what online customers expect from their produce, and I am no exception.
The vegetables I used to order from e-commerce apps always seemed about the same size. If a potato came in a different colour, I was sure the seller had slipped in something dodgy. Sweet potatoes always arrived scrubbed clean and bagged. After a day selling at Ji Shi, I discovered that onions come in all sizes, potatoes in several colours, and that a bit of soil on a sweet potato is perfectly normal. We have forgotten what food actually looks like. Just as people come in all shapes and sizes, and eyes come in more than just black — there are shades of brown, grey, blue, and green……
Yet speed and precision — that is what online customers expect from service. In a society endlessly hungry for efficiency, agricultural products that naturally come in all shapes are forced to conform to “standards” — and industrialised farming follows in their wake. When every e-commerce platform is selling the fantasy of “tap to order, doorbell rings” speed, I do wish online customers could offer shopkeepers a little more patience and grace — and a little more understanding for the farmers and the land.
Once my one-day stint as a rookie shop assistant was over, what I really wanted to say to the warehouse pickers and delivery drivers was: “It’s fine. I’m not in a rush. Take your time.” But if I’m the only one not in a rush, can they truly slow down?
III. The Expert Who Got Roasted the Most
Role at Ji Shi: Taking product photos, posting new stock to WeChat groups
Picking online orders, chatting and goofing off with the farmers
After six years of agricultural studies through both my undergraduate and postgraduate degrees — specialising in ecological agriculture, no less — I can at least tell my crops apart. Even so, I often cannot call out every leafy green by name or describe how one variety’s flavour differs from another’s, and I find myself scrambling to keep up with customers’ questions.
So I decided to escape the awkwardness by chatting with the farmers, hoping to recover a sliver of confidence in territory I actually knew.
Wang Xin from Xiqing Farm was waxing lyrical about his rapeseed planting plan: “Once spring arrives, the rapeseed will be ready to harvest.”
I couldn’t help but interrupt: “Wait — rapeseed here in Beijing can set seed by spring?”
Wang Xin paused, then a long silence followed.
I pressed on: “Are rapeseed and mustard seeds related? They look so similar.”
His eyes brimmed with doubt: “Did you actually study agriculture or not?”
This was not the first time a farmer had looked at me sceptically. Back at university I hadn’t exactly been a slacker. I prided myself on understanding how plants grow, took part in hands-on production stints at farms from China to the Netherlands, and could rattle off the nutrient milestones of crops, the modes of action behind every class of herbicide, and even the Latin names of field pests. Yet every time I chatted with a farmer, my gaps were bound to show. Walking into a greengrocer’s shop where I was already out of my depth made it feel even more like a rookie wandering into a den of veterans.
Far removed from the soil for so long, one forgets the seasons in which things actually grow.
I remember how my professors at the agricultural college would modestly admit that they couldn’t farm as well as the farmers themselves — the gap between theory and practice went without saying. Those textbook facts I’d once had memorised cold, the models and data I’d so carefully constructed before a screen — how much use were they, really, in an actual field?
In the three-plus months since joining Foodthink, every farm visit and every conversation with the farmers has felt like attending some offbeat agriculture college of my own. I can’t help but ask myself: how close must you get to the land to truly understand and respect farming — and the people who till it?
IV. Counting Goods from Over Twenty Farmers in a Single Day
The first time I “took over” Ji Shi, I was on the till. Sales went well enough, apparently, though I’m told I made a fair few mistakes. This time Ji Shi sent Xiao P to supervise my cashiering, and I was assigned to receiving goods and warehousing.
On the day of the takeover, a New Year’s market was happening right outside the shop, and farmers who had come to set up stalls were already dropping off their deliveries first thing in the morning. Beyond the meat, vegetables and eggs from farmers in the Beijing area, Ji Shi sources its other ingredients from dozens of ecological smallholder farms across the country — dried goods, fruit, grains, snacks — all shipped in by courier. With the Spring Festival looming in late January and courier services about to shut down for the holiday, Ji Shi needed to stock up on New Year’s provisions, so parcels came flooding in from every corner of the country, by the boxful.
In twelve hours of work that day, at least three went into unpacking parcels, checking quantities, filling in receiving invoices, and shelving the goods. Even Xiao P was puzzled: how come every order placed over the past week had arrived on the very same day?
I unpacked and shelved the Eight Treasure Rice Pudding, rice cakes, peanut brittle, crumbly pastries, hickory nut kernels, and all manner of festive treats sent by farmers from across the country, feeling quite content: no shortage of tasty things for the New Year now.
But receiving goods is no easy job. The farmers’ deliveries don’t come in standardised crates, so a single line on the receiving invoice — “dried sweet potato, 55 packs; Eight Treasure Rice Pudding, 50 tubs (25 white rice, 25 purple rice)” — means a mind-numbing amount of counting. Someone even made me a meme about it.
By the evening count, I’d filled in twenty receiving invoices. For all the variety, the quantity of each item was modest compared to a supermarket. That day’s new stock ran to fifty or sixty different things — a little from here, a little from there — and just the sweet potatoes alone came in seven or eight varieties from four or five different farms. Without some experience you’d never keep track. Many products arrived in tiny quantities — less counting, perhaps, but still enough to warrant a separate warehouse receipt: Xiqing Farm had sent just two cauliflowers, one big and one small, because that was all they could find in the field.
From a purely commercial standpoint, working with smallholders like this is utterly inefficient. But surely that is precisely the point of Ji Shi’s commitment to them.
V. “I’m the One Actually Selling Vegetables!”
This time at Ji Shi, my job was to write fu (fortune) characters at the Farmers Market outside the shop for visitors browsing the stalls, and when I had a free moment I helped shout for the shepherd Su He at the stall next door.
“These lambs are raised free-range on the family’s own grasslands in East Ujimqin Banner, Xilingol League — grass-fed only, no feed supplements, so the meat is incredibly fragrant!” Having had the good fortune of visiting the source twice, I pitched it to passers-by with real enthusiasm. The sales pitch fell rather flat, though: the only buyer was a colleague who popped in for a visit and generously picked up a pack of sliced lamb.
Compared to my colleagues stocking shelves and manning the till inside the shop, the market outside felt far more like “selling vegetables” — and demanded that farmers actually approach people and draw them in. The Sunday market had specially invited young shepherd Su He to perform khoomei (Mongolian throat singing), which amounted to a spectacular lamb-selling show! Consumers who came to watch the singing were left in awe, yet nobody bought any lamb. Even the occasional browser who paused rarely asked about the lamb’s character or how to cook it; not a single person asked why the lamb cost so much, the production methods we are most proud of perhaps linger at the very margins of what consumers care about.
How do you hold the attention of a constant stream of passing foot traffic? How do you introduce a farmer and their produce to a consumer who knows nothing about ecological agriculture? How do you field their doubts? I had assumed that after one day of “taking over” Ji Shi I’d know the ropes by now, and then I discovered that selling vegetables is a subject with the depth of a university degree — and selling them with a philosophy makes it all the harder.
VI. It’s Really More Than Just Selling Vegetables
Role at Ji Shi: Front-of-house
Bringing Foodthink to “take over” Ji Shi feels a bit like a counter-attack. After all, I was part of Ji Shi’s founding team and for a while I was in the shop every single day, doing whatever was needed. But since founding Foodthink in 2017, I’ve spent far less time here, the work has grown unfamiliar, and I’m not even entirely confident handling the till any more.
Every Ji Shi takeover is one of the rare occasions I spend an entire day in the shop, and it fills me with joy to see the place growing ever closer to the vision we held when we first created it: A space that brings together the finest food, things, and people.
Over the course of the day, the morning saw a flurry of activity inside Ji Shi — receiving and selling produce — while outside, the farmers’ New Year market bustled along. At midday, the farmer on cooking duty brought out enough lunch for thirty, all made from ingredients everyone had contributed.
In the afternoon, Foodthink invited some friends to screen two fermentation-themed documentaries we had produced and translated. As they watched, everyone tasted fermented foods: a steaming bowl of fermented glutinous rice soup and French Brie cheese.
In the evening, partners from the Farmer Seed Network and Professor Qiao Yuhui from China Agricultural University came to visit. Everyone — market friends, farmers, and guests alike — sat down to a self-service cheese crêpe spread at the Smallholder Table, with all the ingredients, of course, coming from Ji Shi’s ecological smallholder farmers.
Perhaps few shops in the world are quite like this one: in a modest space in the heart of a bustling city, it houses products from ecological smallholders across the country, showcases sustainable food-system practices from around the world, draws in stakeholders who care about this cause, and lets you taste the most delicious ecological produce — all under one roof.
But the foundation for all of this is the diligent labour of every farmer tending their land, the day-in, day-out, painstaking work of each Ji Shi colleague, and every consumer voting with their purchases for the world they want to live in.
This year’s New Year’s Eve: 9 February 2023, 10am–6pm, I’ll be on duty at Ji Shi at Sanyuanqiao Li Xiang alongside Xiao Chao, who helped co-found the shop, serving everyone on the last day of the Year of the Rabbit. Readers spending the holiday in Beijing, come and buy your vegetables and New Year provisions from us.
Scan the QR code on the poster below to hear Foodthink colleagues chat about the hot and cold knowledge of selling vegetables:
Wishing
everyone
an
early
Happy
New
Year!
Happy New Year!
Co-ordination: Ning Chen, Mei Ying
Images: Ling Ge, Foodthink
Editor: Tian Le