Know your customer. It’s one of the most basic tenets of business, but it’s one that can often be hard to track — especially if you don’t get face time with the people you sell to on a regular basis.

But growers are making the time and effort to truly collaborate with their customers and cater their produce to their exact specifications. Ryan Pierce, owner of Fresh Impact Farms, is doing just that by talking to each and every chef he delivers to.

Pierce thrives on feedback, and is innovating the growing process to create high-quality, hyperlocal food in a small, 1,000-square foot operation. He has a direct line to restaurants all over the Washington, D.C. area, creating the exact flavor, texture and color his customers want.

That kind of attention to detail and customer service may very well take him to new levels (and lots of new flavor profiles.) Pierce is breaking the mold, and chefs are loving it. You can read more about the chef-grower relationship in this month’s cover story.

Trends vary throughout the U.S. and Canada, and what might be in high demand for a greenhouse in Kansas, might not be popular in New York. It all depends on your unique customers. So while nationwide trends are always good to keep an eye on, it all comes down to your area.

Sales numbers can always tell you what’s working and what’s not, they can’t tell you about opportunities to grow and tweak your offerings to be even more successful. There could be a niche you haven’t thought of or a plant customers are looking for but can’t find, and you’ll never know until you ask.

Feedback, while not always easy to gather or process, is key to improving any business’ operations and outputs. Whether you’re talking to customers in a retail setting, at a delivery, on the phone, through a mailer or in an email, leave the lines of communication open. And while customers will likely tell you when you’re doing something wrong, they might not always be telling you when you’re doing something right, or when you could be doing something new.

However you choose to gather feedback, don’t let it go to waste. At the end of the season, use it strategically to plan for the coming year. And don’t forget to let your customers know that you appreciate their comments (both positive and negative) to keep the feedback coming. If your customers feel that they’re being heard, that’s a win of its own.

Everyone wants to make a first great impression, and that’s no different for professional chefs. They typically get one opportunity to make that great impression with a customer who sits down to dine with them. Otherwise, that diner may never come back. Freshness, flavor and appearance from the first bite is crucial to the success of any chef-driven restaurant.

With produce taking center stage for more and more restaurants and high-end chefs, the produce they offer needs to be fresh, flavorful and locally sourced. If you haven’t yet forged great partnerships with local chefs in your area, now’s a great time to start.

Tough market

If you’re not familiar with the restaurant scene in Dallas, where I live and do my eating out, let’s just say it’s serious business. We all eat out a lot here, but the restaurant industry is known to be quite carnivorous. A multitude of new restaurants pop up daily, only to be chewed up and spit out before you can finish a first read of their menu. To survive and thrive here as a serial-success chef, you must be a smart chef with great relationships — and know how to source great produce.

I wanted to get some personal insight directly from a chef’s perspective. Luckily, I have a friend who happens to be one of Dallas’ best-known restaurateurs and executive chefs. Jeana Johnson currently anchors CANVAS, a new up-and-coming restaurant and bar in Dallas, but has owned and launched several other prominent restaurant ventures here in Big D. I texted her and begged her to answer some questions about what she really wants, and needs, from her local produce farmers.

What’s new?

When it comes to current trends, Johnson tells me that she — and other chefs — are using all parts of a plant in different applications on a dish. “So, a shaved fennel salad would be uniquely garnished with the fronds [leaves] and some quick pickled stem,” she says. A root to shoot experience if you will.

She says that using heirloom varietals is also a trend that has been popular for a while but is sustaining. Johnson also sees an uptick in use of hybrid vegetables such as Caulilini. “Anything new you can bring to the plate that is interesting to the eye and new to the customer is easy to use as a wow factor in presentation,” she says.

Too hard to find?

When it comes to finding the right growers with which to partner, Johnson says it’s all about knowing where to look. When I asked her if she had regular troubles finding the right produce, she told me, “There really isn’t much that, if you are cooking seasonally and regionally, you can’t source locally.” The message there is, the locally available produce — by season — is what is driving what local diners find on their plates. That means you as the grower are in charge when it comes to what chefs are working with in their kitchens. Ultimately you are driving the food trends. However, if a chef must know where to look, as Johnson says, that might mean you’re making yourself too hard to find.

As a wholesale produce grower, you might not think that public marketing is necessary, or your responsibility. Not so. We all share the same end consumer. Elevating your brand awareness, both to the end consumer and the local food community, is a must for building your brand reputation and commercial sales. The easier you are to find and relate to, the better your commercial relationships will be.

Johnson offers a key piece of strategic advice for small growers: band together with other small local farmers so you have backup sources for your orders.

Grow to scale

From Johnson’s perspective, challenges working with local growers often come down to a matter of scale. She finds that small local growers often can’t support the volume needs of a larger production. These volume limitations do cause her to pause, she says, when deciding to list and name a specialty product on a menu — or not. “For example,” Johnson says, “if I was buying a baby lettuce mix from a large-scale produce company, I wouldn’t necessarily be able to call the farm out by name. But I could count on them being able to source the product at all times from a large bank of sources.”

Risky business

Johnson also points out other challenges of highlighting specific farmers and their produce on her menus. “If something happened at the farm (they lose a greenhouse to weather) or they simply cannot grow as much as I need, I now have an entire dish that cannot be produced with a named product,” Johnson says. Her choice often comes down to going against her ethics of using locally sourced produce to using large-scale production for peace of mind — or not offering specific produce at all. Neither are good options in Johnson’s opinion.

On this point, Johnson offers a key piece of strategic advice for small growers: band together with other small local farmers so you have backup sources for your orders. Johnson insists that good farm-to-farm relationships are key to success. “If I had the surety that my farmer had a great relationship with a fellow farmer, should he/she not be able to provide sufficient product, it would make it much easier to use their [named] product” she says.

So, it’s not just your farm-to-chef relationship that matters, but also your grower-to-grower community.

Building great long-term relationships with local chefs does mean making the effort to cater to and customize their needs, when you can. Johnson recommends asking your chefs what they really like and want to buy. “Inventive chefs are typically ahead of the curve on what they would like to see,” she says. Consider doing special grows of specific seasonal product for your valued chef partners.

The key to success for any business often comes down to networking and cross industry partnerships. As food markets continue to hyper-localize, getting to know great chefs in your area may be key to your future growth.

Customers surveyed after the initial phase of the program found that:

68% said that they eat more fruits and vegetables thanks to this program.

71% felt more educated about nutrition and healthy eating.

Here are some more stats on the state of farmers markets in the United States:

In the United States, there are 2.7 farmers markets per 100,000 citizens.

32 States have an active state food policy council.

There are currently 234 active local food policy councils.

There are 212 active food hubs in the United States.

Source:https://www.cdc.gov/nutrition/downloads/fruits-vegetables/2018/2018-fruit-vegetable-report-508.pdf

Each day you walk into your office, are you considering what type of culture you are cultivating? Are you and your team of leaders aware that your actions will dictate whether you are cultivating a culture of compliance or a culture of connection, commitment and community?

Daily, you are faced with important decisions, and how you handle those decisions as well as how you interact with your team, will dictate the culture. Your organization’s culture will ultimately determine what kind of experience your customers and clients will have.

If you were placed at the helm of a multimillion-dollar Air Force cargo jet or commercial airliner under stress and other challenges, there would be a necessity for cohesiveness, communication and commitment in order to be the high-performance team required to operate these jets. You already have a great team, but is your team ready to handle their job along with the stress of combat? This is why it is critical to have the right skillsets that will enable you and your team to trust the training, trust the process and trust the people.

To cultivate cohesiveness, connection and commitment in these fast-paced, high-performance teams, there are seven critical skillsets that should be present and encouraged.

1. Professional knowledge

Professional knowledge is critical and is the foundation to any high-performance individual and team. When your people are equipped with the professional knowledge essential to their jobs, it’s easier to empower them and trust them to make decisions when things get challenging. Think about a professional pilot and consider how knowledgeable you want them to be. Would you consider your team trained to have that level of knowledge, to execute their job, when hundreds of lives are on the line?

2. Situational awareness

Situational awareness (SA) is the ability to understand and comprehend environmental elements, events and possible scenarios as it applies to time, space and the collective comprehension of someone’s interpretation. There are multiple types of SA to include individual, team and organizational SA. To make the right decisions at the right time, it is critical that SA is present. SA has been cited as a fundamental tactic to successful decision-making in aviation, healthcare, emergency response and many other high-stress environments. The lack of SA, according to scholarly documents, has been a driving factor in accidents attributed to human error. To keep your operation performing at its best and being positioned for continued improvement, your people need to have collective SA for any threats that might harm the operations. What kind of training has been put in place that helps to cultivate and reinforce this skillset?

3. Assertiveness

Assertiveness is defined as confident, forceful and self-assured behavior. Further, assertiveness is being self-assured and confident without being aggressive. When it is time to make business decisions and the fate of your organization is on the line, like flying a commercial airliner with hundreds of passengers onboard, it is imperative that your people are trained, ready and willing to speak up and assert their voice to avert a disaster. When the success of your organization is on the line, your people need to be empowered to speak up and assert themselves, appropriately, to ensure the operation continues smoothly and, in many cases, for the operation to improve. Can your people trust that the leadership team will be ready to listen and acknowledge when they speak up and assert themselves for the greater good of the organization?

4. Decision-making

Decision-making is the process and action of making choices, especially important choices, by identifying a decision, gathering information and assessing alternative possibilities. When you look at decision-making and its application to your environment and how it relates to high-performance teams, you need to be ready and able to make important and significant decisions. Sometimes these decisions will have to be made in very short order, without supervision. To make these time-sensitive decisions, your people will need to be empowered, and know that they are prepared and trusted to make decisions that can be very critical to the operation and success of the organization. Consider what you can do to equip, prepare and empower your people to make the right decision, in a moment’s notice, at the right time.

5. Communication

Communication is defined as the exchange of information or news. When it’s crunch time and critical decisions need to be made, whether in flight at 35,000 feet in the air flying at 600 mph, or when a major deal is on the table for your organization, communication is essential. When it’s time to make decisions, given the time-critical scenario, you want, need and expect your people to communicate. Have your people been empowered and trusted to communicate the critical information at the right time and right place?

6. Leadership

Leadership is defined as the act of leading a group of people or organization. Every organization, especially high-performing organizations, need true and authentic leadership. They need leadership that is effective at all levels of execution. Leadership in your teams and organization must be further defined as the people that influence others to accomplish the team and organizational objectives in a manner that makes the team more cohesive and more committed to each other, the mission at hand and the organization.

7. Adaptability

Adaptability means being able to adjust to new conditions. When your organization or team is moving at the speed of success, it is imperative that members are adaptable. The organization must empower its people to be ready and prepared to adapt to different scenarios. When flying commercial jets across the world, there is likely to be turbulence and weather formations along the route. In order to get to the intended destination safely, the crew must be adaptable to go over, under and around the turbulence and thunderstorms. Being adaptable can only happen when the people have been empowered.

The next time you walk into your office, you should be clear on the culture you are cultivating. These skillsets will support the making of a connected, committed and community-like environment.

The author is a leadership and trust speaker, consultant and certified character coach. As a decorated combat veteran, he brings unique perspectives gained from his battlefield experience to organizations. The author's No Fail Trust™ methodology was crafted from his own harrowing, life-altering experiences, and conveys the importance of cross-generational communication and mutual trust. JasonOHarris.com