NOT BUSINESS AS USUAL

THE COVID-19 pandemic has not only changed consumer behaviour in some areas, but it has changed the way some local farmers conduct business with their customers.

Andrea Power, Owner and Managing Director of Hatchman’s Premium Cheeses, acknowledged the above recently, as she spoke with The Barbados Advocate following a presentation which she made at the close of a Backyard Gardening Training Workshop held by registered local charity, The Emerald Project, at the Valley Resource Centre in St. George. During that session, Power shared with participants how she was able to keep her business afloat during the previous lockdown period, on account of the pandemic. She later acknowledged that one positive spin-off from the pandemic has been a change in the way farmers now deliver produce to their customers and the subsequent rise in demand for fresh produce and products manufactured locally, in general.

“I think that the COVID-19 pandemic has changed patterns of consumer behaviour. First of all, with supermarkets closed, people still wanted food and it meant that farmers who typically might not have been interested in delivering, because delivery is expensive and there is a cost attached to doing it, but you nevertheless had a number of farmers now willing to deliver products to consumers. They got the critical mass, because very often the problem is that you are just delivering to one person or two persons. But I found that farmers were now using social media a lot more, to reach their customers. So I had a group of farmers that would send me a WhatsApp message at the end of every week, telling me what vegetables were available, like a Veg Box and I would order every week,” Power explained.

“So that took care of my supermarket shopping, in terms of vegetables. We know that everybody shops for vegetables fresh every week, so I felt that whereas before a customer might have said that St. Lucy was too far to get to, all of sudden it wasn’t that far anymore. The lockdown made everything feel so remote, so much so that you were glad to get out of the house and do the drive to St. Lucy as an excursion and I found that people were more connected to their food. So when you go to the farm or the processor, you are getting a better choice of what is available,” she added.

“So I think that if there is a silver lining that we can pull from COVID-19, it is a reorientation of behaviour. I hope this reorientation continues, because that is what is going to drive sustained demand for farmers and it is also going to improve rural livelihoods,” Power stressed.

Speaking about how she was able to manage her own business, Power noted that for her Barbadian-based artisanal cheese manufacturing company, which produces high quality products from the milk of local cows and goats, she had to scale back on sales during the lockdown. However, on the plus side, greater emphasis was made in the area of production, which has proven key, as demand rose again for her products, once the country reopened.