Nature Fresh Farms will bring its mobile Greenhouse Education Center to the Organic Produce Summit in Monterey, Calif., as part of the OPS Buyer Field Tour. Nature Fresh Farms has used its Greenhouse Education Center for school education in the past, but this time the company will bring a more immersive experience to OPS.
“What we’re doing with the Greenhouse Education Center this time is really having it be that immersive, experiential kind of event,” says Meaghan O’Brien, senior communications manager with Nature Fresh Farms. “Attendees are not going to expect presentations. It’s really going to be that open dialogue.”
O’Brien says the intention is to create excitement around Nature Fresh Farms and what the company offers buyers and how the company builds relationships with buyers.
“They’ll also learn a little bit from a consumer standpoint, what is the evolving consumer looking like? What are they valuing?” she says. “They’ll learn that health and safety is the top, flavor plays into it, transparency, and a few other things.”
O’Brien says above all, the stop will be fun with a DJ playing music with rotating stops to different zones within the stop.
“We don’t want it to be your crunchy, typical corporate event,” O’Brien says. “There’s even going to be kind of a passport system where at each zone, they get a trading pin. We want people to leave our space and be decked out in Nature Fresh Farms swag.”
At one stop, a representative from Koppert will talk about pollination and bees and the stop will also highlight Nature Fresh Farms’ integrated pest management system.
“It’s good bugs to take care of the bad bugs,” O’Brien says of integrated pest management. “And that’s how we really manage the reduction of chemicals for our commercial product and no chemical use for our organic product.”
O’Brien says the intention of this Greenhouse Education Center stop is to break down the jargon and language used to describe greenhouse production and “really bring them into what goes into making a quality product.”
She says this goes beyond standard meetings by highlighting the qualities that create the flavor and sweetness and how bees play into the consistency.
There will also be a water tasting, which O’Brien says attendees will try five different water samples. While this seems trivial, it holds a very distinct purpose for Nature Fresh Farms.
“It’s in the intent of really figuring out what type of a taster are you,” she says. “When we do our tasting panels, we require that people have like average or above ability to taste. The reason why we do this water tasting actually at Nature Fresh Farms is to weed out the 25% of non-tasters, which there are 25% of the population that cannot taste. And there was actually 25% of the population that are considered super tasters. That kind of speaks to that level of quality that we pride ourselves of. We won’t let it go out to our customers unless it’s that quality.”
O’Brien says the goal is to create emotions and tap into the different senses that consumers and buyers experience produce through.
“The buyer takeaways for us are really, we want them to walk away and know that it’s flavor that wins,” she says. “They know that we have quality flavor product, and they know that flavor really makes your customers come back for more. We want them to believe in that consistency and quality that we’re able to offer and retail partnership and food service partnership, it really is about partnership.”
O’Brien says another key point is how Nature Fresh Farms works with retailers and buyers to help better understand their consumers and what kind of solutions best meet the buyer and consumers’ needs.
“We’re really starting to look towards that consumer first approach as well because if we are able to know the consumer better, we’re able to help our customers be able to sell and grow the category,” she says.
Another key takeaway O’Brien says she hopes tourgoers get from the Greenhouse Education Center is how Nature Fresh Farms pioneered greenhouse-grown organic strawberries and is also a key leader in organic greenhouse production.
“Peter Quiring, our majority shareholder and founder, believed strongly, and we still believe this today that organic should not be a luxury,” she says. “It should really be accessible.”
Nature Fresh Farms will also have a booth on the trade show floor, No. 400, where it will highlight its organic tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and strawberries including the new premium organic Sauci roma tomato.
