Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Max Morningstar . We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Max , appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?

Our farm name is MX Morningstar Farm. I struggled with the name for a long time, trying to find something that fit for where the business was at the time and that could be grown into, something that could work if the business shifted and say, became a distribution company. I was blessed with a suitable last name that made the process a little easier: Morningstar. It felt obvious to use this, but wanted to find something to make it catchy, something with a little more edge, so I incorporated other aspects of my name. M is my first initial, X is my middle. So MX Morningstar Farm was born.

Some issues I did not consider:
My name, Max Morningstar, becomes very redundant when speaking to a group about my farm. “Hi I am Max Morningstar from MX Morningstar Farm” Say that a couple times and let it roll around.
It is a lot to write on forms.
It doesn’t fit in the DMV system.
It feels narcissistic
It doesn’t allow for others to feel ownership in the business when it’s named so directly after the owner.

But, it works. Predicting the future is very hard, but all things considered I think we did alright. We are working on a rebrand now, and part of the conversation is the name and if something should be done to simplify it.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My name is Max, and I am the co-owner of MX Morningstar Farm, a family run organic vegetable farm in the Hudson Valley. Our farm is widely known for high quality and diverse vegetables, sold primarily though our onsite farm store. We had been renovating and building out our store for the grand opening when the Covid-19 pandemic started. We were lucky that for us in our corner of Upstate New York, it was a boon.
The population of our little county grew by over 50%, and the median income skyrocketed as residents of NYC fled the pandemic. While this was happening, we opened a beautiful and well stocked small scale grocery and produce shop that attracted many neighbors, locals, and weekenders alike. All in all it was good timing for the farm business.

We grow a wide array of crops, as many vegetable farms here do, but it is our quality and attention to detail that really sets us apart. Clean, trimmed and easy to work with, our products are the gold standard for produce in the area. We grow a lot of Italian specialty crops. Specialty radicchio, Puntarelle di Galatina, Broccolo Fiolaro, etc. These get a lot of attention here.

Our business has reached a certain level of success now based on two main principals:
Quality and Reliability.
We are open 7 days a week year round and almost never close save for some holidays and blizzards. Everyone here knows that any day of the week they can walk into our shop to find the nicest ingredients and most beautiful vegetables available.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

Originally the business, founded in 2014, was a sole-proprietorship owned by me. One reason for this is that farm didn’t have much to share, another reason is that I hadn’t met my business partner and future wife yet. When we started we were marketing produce through a variety of channels including two farmers markets in Westchester county, New York. Maria, my business partner and wife, had recently moved back to New York after living abroad in Italy and Canada. Her parents were regular shoppers at the market, which is how I met Maria. After several months of talking about food and ingredients and cooking, we decided to see each other outside of the market, and the rest writes itself. But the real story here, is that we started as romantic partners, one a farmer, the other not. Maria immediately started working for the business and her role grew as her drive and experience did. After a terrible season in 2015, one that taught us how fragile our business was, Maria stepped in to help guide the business in its new direction going into year 3. The farm became an official partnership in 2022, but was functionally a partnership since that 2016 season.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

The small farm/regenerative farm world has always been plagued by poor service and quality guised behind a story that sounds like this: “The rest of the industry is evil and we aren’t evil so you need to deal with our low quality and unprofessional attitude because if you don’t you are a bad person and you are killing the planet”. Unfortunately our industry needs to grow out of this if we want to make any real difference in the world.
Our farm’s reputation is built around high quality and reliable professional service.

If something isn’t good, we don’t sell it. If we said we’re going to do something, we do it. No excuses.
Meeting people where they are, and understanding that you have to work for your customers, not the other way around.

Contact Info:

• Website: mxmorningstarfarm.com
• Instagram: @mxmorningstarfarm & @morningstarfarmstore

Image Credits
Maria Zordan