Sharon Farmers Market First Day!
Saturday, June 14th, 2014
Here’s a new spot for the 2014 season – the Sharon Farmers Market at the Cresent Ridge Dairy (in Sharon, MA). We’ll be here every Saurday from 10 am – 2 pm, all the way till the end of October. We were looking to rework our popping schedule last year and tried a bunch of different farmers markets. We discovered this market at the end of the season and gave it a whirl for the last 3 weeks in October. It was a brand new market that started that year and we weren’t sure how well it would pan out. We did descent traffic for an end of the season market so we’re back this year to see what happens. At the moment it’s keeping pace with our Framingham location, and we’ve been there for 7 years. We’ve noticed a sort of sales curve for the season – our best week is usually the first week of August in all of our locations. If Sharon fits this curve, we should be doing pretty well later in the year.
The layout looks pretty good. It’s on a main road with good visibility. The Cresent Ridge Dairy has been selling ice cream from this location for years, so plenty of people naturally come here. Groups of people were still showing up at 2 o’clock to get ice cream when we started to break down. The owner agreed to sell some bags inside their store during the rest of the week, we ended up selling 2 of them before we left the parking lot because we were out of stock.
You’ll find some farmers markets tucked away in obscure spots and it’s totally up to the market manager to drive traffic. Many of these types of places can end up up doing poorly. The Sharon farmes market has a ton of things going for it. They also have a marketing team promoting the farmers market itself. Haven’t seen that anywhere else, so we’re impressed with the effort they’ve put into making it work.
In addition, you can pet some cows and goats out back. It’s a whole legit dairy farm operation so it’s kind of a neat place to explore, hang out and get some crazy yummy ice cream.
