Food Trucks of New Brunswick: The Farmers’ Truck
CAP PELÉ–After a year in business, The Farmers’ Truck has added a new truck that incorporates everything they’ve learned so far, and is designed to better serve their customers.
The Farmers’ Truck carries local produce and pops up in locations all over the Moncton area. We caught up with co-founder and CEO Fred LaForge to find out how the first year has gone.
How long have you been in business and what started it all?
We started last year, in June 2015, and we’ve been thinking about the idea for the past year and a half so we started talking about it in 2013 and then 2014 was more or less putting everything together and 2015 was the launch of the business.
My partner is Mathieu Reyjal. He is a farmer in Cap Pelé, a young farmer. He’s got a background in civil engineering and he’s got an MBA. He was working for the lottery for a while and he decided to buy a farm and grow his own vegetables. He quit his job and went to do that. I had a marketing agency, quite successful and we met through a networking event and he said ‘I need branding for my farm’ and I said ‘cool, I was born and raised on a farm so I can help you out with that. I know the ins and outs.’ He said ‘I also want to do some packaging. I’m opening up a store at my farm.’ We started talking about what he was going to do and I said ‘It’s too bad it’s so far in Cap Pelé, a forty minute drive. What if it was mobile?’ And then the idea came.
So you’re doing this full-time now?
No, I have a full-time job. Mathieu is full-time on the truck. I couldn’t run two businesses at the same time so one of our clients made us a generous offer to go and join them. They’re called Dovico software. I’m an app designer, that’s what I do, user experience. They offered us to join, the whole team, join their team and I can have more time to work on the side.
Where do you get the produce?
Our mission is to support local farmers. As local as possible as long as the prices are decent. We want to pay fair price market but our rule is 160 kilometre radius from Moncton. That’s what we’ve been trying as much as possible for. Sometimes we’re a bit more than that but our mission is 160 kilometres.
What sort of standards do you have for what you carry?
Non-GMO. We need to know where it comes from and as much as we can, we talk to the farmers. Sometimes we deal with distributors and they don’t want to tell us where they got the produce but they tell us it’s in that area. But when we know the farmer, we can talk to them. Sometimes they’re not specifically certified organic but they don’t spray their produce so we know that and we can talk to the customer about it.
Do you have those conversations a lot with customers?
People always ask if everything’s local. Yeah, 100 per cent. They’re discovering that we do have some nice local produce and that’s part of the whole thing, to make local products sexy. Yes it’s a little bit more money because we pay a little bit more for it and we need to make our margins but at the end of the day you’re paying for a little girl to go to her ballet dances or you’re paying for a kid to go to hockey school. It’s all in the community.
How does your season work?
We started in June and we could start in June because it was a lot nicer. The winter was a lot nicer this year but last year we had to wait until July. The farmers were behind so it was a bad year. But typically our season would be from June until mid-October, pretty much Thanksgiving. And then we are working on an online store. The whole goal of that is to extend the season and offer a new kind of way for people to get their produce and their local stuff. We’re working with some businesses to bring the packages right to their businesses so they don’t have to pay for delivery. We would have an agreement.
Would you be delivering to people’s doors?
That’s what we’ve been working on. If you would order before noon we would deliver to your door in the same day for a fee we’re still figuring out. It’s probably going to be under $10 for delivery. If you order after noon then it’s going to be next day delivery.
Who is your customer base?
We did a survey last year and most of the people who shop at the truck are women. They’re very educated. We’ve asked what kind of education they’ve had. The majority of them had four plus years and the second majority had ten or plus years. They want to buy and feel that they’re doing more than just buying a vegetable. They want to buy and make a difference at the same time. That seems to resonate a lot with them and people in general are just getting more educated about buying local. … People who really feel like they want to make a difference, they come to the truck.
What are your plans for the future?
The new truck. The whole winter we’ve been designing (the new truck). We worked with a student architect, we designed the look and feel for someone shopping at the truck and how it feels when you’re inside. We’ve really thought about a lot of things we didn’t think about when we did (the first) truck. Our goal is to take that truck and use it as our flagship model for our franchise. We’re hoping to get this truck in the hands of Farmer’s Co-op so they can sell their own produce. That is our goal and we want to see that across Canada and the United States.