The Food Was Right There. I Still Didn’t Know How to Buy It.
What one table of unfamiliar products taught us about the gap between producing food and creating a customer
The food was right in front of me.
I had money in my pocket. I wanted to support the producer. I was curious about what they had made.
And I still didn’t know what to buy.
The table was filled with dried herbs, powders, plants, and products that were clearly useful to someone who knew what they were looking at.
I was not that someone.
I kept picking things up and asking some version of the same question:
What do I do with this?
That question changed the way I thought about food access.
We often talk about access in terms of whether food is physically available. Is there a grocery store nearby? A farmers market? A farm stand? Can someone afford the food? Can they get there?
Those things matter.
But having a product within reach does not necessarily make it accessible.
Sometimes the missing piece is consumer confidence.
Eventually, the producer showed me something I understood: dried goldenrod that could be steeped as an herbal tea.
There it was.
I could picture the next step.
Put it in hot water. Steep it. Drink it.
I bought it.
Nothing about the product had changed. What changed was my ability to imagine myself using it.
That interaction gave us a question we think every food producer should consider:
What does your customer need to know, have, or understand to have a successful experience with your product?
Maybe the answer is nothing. Everyone knows what to do with an apple.
But what about dried herbs? An unfamiliar variety of squash? A locally milled grain? A fermented vegetable? A cut of meat someone has never cooked? Dried beans for a customer who has spent a lifetime buying them from a can?
The producer may know exactly what to do with the product.
The customer may not.
That gap matters.
The Product Is Only Part of the Experience
Imagine you grow beautiful dried beans.
You can put a one-pound bag on a table and sell beans.
Or you can think about what happens after someone picks up that bag.
Do they know how long to soak them? How to cook them? What to season them with? What to serve with them? Could you give them a simple recipe? Pair them with rice and tomatoes? Introduce them to another producer whose product complements yours?
Suddenly, you're not simply selling beans.
You're helping someone imagine dinner.
The same principle can take dozens of forms:
A recipe printed on the label
Three simple ways to use an unfamiliar ingredient
A sample at the farmers market
A QR code linking to a 30-second demonstration
A meal bundle
A pairing with another producer's product
Storage instructions that reduce food waste
A conversation at the table
None of those requires changing what you grow or make.
They change the conditions around the product.
And sometimes that may be enough to turn curiosity into a purchase.
Walk in the Customer's Footsteps
At GOTURSIX, we spend a lot of time thinking about the barriers between a food producer and a successful food business.
Project Pickle grew from a simple metaphor:
A cucumber can feed a family. A pickle can feed a business.
But there is another person in that journey: the customer.
If we're going to help producers build stronger enterprises, we also need to understand what happens on the other side of the table.
So here's a question we're adding to our work with food producers:
What does your customer experience from the moment they encounter your product until the moment they successfully use it?
Where might they hesitate?
What might they not know?
What are you assuming they already understand?
And what could you do to make their next step easier?
That afternoon, my barrier wasn't money, distance, availability, or willingness to support a producer.
I simply didn't know what to do with what was in front of me.
A short conversation changed that.
I went home with the goldenrod.
The producer went home with a sale.
And we went home with one more piece of the Missing Middle.
