We recently connected with Benji Ballmer and have shared our conversation below.

Benji, appreciate you joining us today. So let’s jump to your mission – what’s the backstory behind how you developed the mission that drives your brand?

“If you control the food, you control a nation…” – Henry Kissinger

Our mission from day 1 has been, “To decentralize the food system, 1 customer at a time.”

What if we could reconnect people to their food supply? This is the question that we have asked ourselves from inception. By making our slogan, “Who Grew Your Food?”, we have challenged our customers to go beyond the shelves of their grocery store, and find out the details on their foodshed.

Who is growing?
What practices are they using?
Are they being compensated appropriately?
How are they caring for the land and animals?
Are they using anything that could be harmful to the planet, animal, or human health at any point along the way?

We vote on average 3 times a day for how we want our food system to look.
1 vote = $$ spent on your last meal

Are we constantly voting for a more sustainable food system or are we voting for our current food system that exists purely through homogenizing, pasteurizing, systematizing, commoditizing, and industrializing the very thing that sustains the health of every other system that we depend on including healthcare, the environment, and the economy?

At the Yellowbird Foodshed, we endeavor to connect the eater to the grower and in doing so hope that we have equipped both to challenge the culture in ways that could save humanity and the planet…the food is pretty good too!!

Benji, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I started by growing veggies.

I quickly realized that the small, independent grower has a sizeable challenge to be able to bring their food to market in a financially meaningful way.

With this in mind, it was not that big of a stretch to envision what it would look like if you could find the absolute best food growers in the region, and “co-op” their food together into one place that could reach not dozens of people…but thousands of people.

We stared with just a few growers and just a few customers and have continued to grow both the supply side, as well as the demand side for the last decade.

Turns out, the food speaks for itself. After a person tries one of our Ohio grown carrots, that was picked only 24-48 hours before eating, they will never want to go back to the grocery store again for the things that were impersonating carrots in the produce section of the local big box.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

We knew early on that we couldn’t just try and compete by selling apples to apples.

The food system is the way it is because it is cheap, easy, and predictable to do food the way we have done it in the last 60 years.

We needed to create a culture that valued every step of the farm-to-plate process and was willing to go against the grain for how they were going to shop for their groceries. We needed to cultivate a lifestyle that begins and ends with not compromising on the things we are putting into our bodies.

Through great art, great word of mouth, fun swag, and audacious yellow vehicles, we were able to begin to get people excited about what we were doing. People make purchasing decisions for almost everything based on 2 closely related questions.
1. “will this make me healthier?”
AND/OR
2. “will this make my family healthier?”

Buyers don’t want INFORMATION, they want TRANSFORMATION.

Our hope was that we find the core believers in the product, give them the tools to tell their friends through social media, and then create a wave of consumers who were willing to learn about other things in the food system that they may not have known about.

We found that when we led with a bunch of information about how the soil contributed to our gut microbiome, a few people were interested. When we led with flavor, freshness, and nutrient density, MANY people were not only interested but WANTED to tell everyone they knew about what they were tasting.

We created an incentive for referrals that if someone signed up through another member, BOTH people would get $10 credit to their account.

To this day, our #1 way we gain new customers is through word of mouth.

How do you keep in touch with clients and foster brand loyalty?

Today, to be better than most companies in customer service, all you have to do is answer the phone with a real human.

We have multiple people whose only job is to respond to customer’s questions, comments, and complaints. We almost always are able to keep to “The customer is always right” mentality and offer tips, tricks, recipes, refunds, or replacements when needed.

We email directly through personal emails, we create meaningful content and email through Mailchimp, and we tell the story of WHERE THE FOOD CAME FROM!

Yellowbird is NOT the hero of this story!

The customer is the hero and the food grower is the rockstar, all we are doing is making sure those two parties meet…even just virtually.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.yellowbirdfs.com
• Instagram: https://www.pinterest.com/yellowbirdfoodshed/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/YellowBirdFS/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/yellowbirdfs