Case Study: Launching a D2C Farm with the MeatSquad's Help

Rachel Jantzi moved from eastern Canada to British Columbia with a plan: launch a direct-to-consumer farm focused on regenerative practices. She had plenty of farm experience and a detailed cost analysis and business plan, but marketing was not in her skill set.

Rachel came to us after watching a webinar about selling meat online, and then purchasing our mEat Commerce Essentials Course. According to her, she “signed up for the Meat E-commerce course as this is exactly the information I need to learn this year. What you said in the webinar was so bang-on to my frustrations as a customer buying meat, particularly shipping costs and cart abandonment, and unexpected meat weight/costs at invoicing. These are things I wanted to address when I sell meat myself and you gave the solutions that I have been looking for, so thank you for this and for creating the timely e-commerce course.”

But that wasn’t the end of her interaction with ChopLocal and the MeatSquad. She also needed help designing her logo, marketing materials, and website.

And so, while Rachel was busy building chicken coops and putting up fencing on her new farm in British Columbia, the ChopLocal MeatSquad went to work on everything she needed to get started with her marketing.

Rachel had a very specific idea in mind for her branding. She had already chosen the name “Grazing Patch Farm” and the tagline “Regenerating One Patch at a Time.” To go along with these perfect words, she wanted a logo that looked like it was embroidered on denim.

We went through a few different iterations with different fonts, and ended up with a logo that encompassed all of the elements Rachel wanted: stitching around the border that signifies fenced paddocks in rotational grazing, animals on lush grasses, and the natural landscape is incorporated as part of the farm.

After agreeing on the logo and visual elements of the brand, we built a Shopify ecommerce store to match. Although Rachel does not ship her meat or eggs, she wanted a simple way for farmers market customers to order online for pick-up.

In addition to the branding package and website, the MeatSquad provided Rachel with:

• Farmers market signage
• Business cards
• Canva design templates
• Email templates
• Social Media coaching

About six months after finishing the project, Rachel and Katie met to go over the results.

Here are a few key takeaways:

• The marketing materials at farmers markets effectively communicated Rachel’s products and production methods.
• Customers understood Rachel’s offerings before she had to explain.
• Rachel’s clear marketing contrasted with competitors who lacked visual explanations

And according to Rachel, working with Katie and the MeatSquad was really helpful. “Everything overall was awesome…The website, the artwork, all of it was perfect. Bang on, on time,” she said, “Your feedback is so good and so helpful, but also so encouraging. In that summer, there were times I was just emotionally drained and had nothing, and your feedback — it actually empowered me, inspired me and helped me just do it without feeling bad about it, which in that emotionally down time is hard to do.”

One of the things that became so very clear working with Rachel is that each of us have our own strengths, and I could never do what she does, and she probably couldn’t do what I do. But when we put our talents to work, we can accomplish great things!

Listen to our interview with Rachel on Meat Success Podcast here!