Tweet for Veggies!

Hidden Valley has come up with a great marketing idea. In an effort to promote vegetables to kids, Hidden Valley is offering a $10,000 grant. The new twist is that it's a Twitter contest. Anyone can tweet about the grant and by including @HVRanch #lyvgrants in the post, you are entered. The contest runs for the next couple weeks so sign in to Twitter, and re-tweet my post:

Please RT! Winton Woods Primary North kids like veggies. They'd LOVE them if they got the $10,000 Hidden Valley grant. @HVRanch #lyvgrants

Thanks!

One Step Forward, and then...

On Tuesday, Barry went to a zoning meeting. He spent over an hour convincing the 6 member board to issue a variance for our permanent produce market location. The main obstacle was the "open-air" feature. The board was concerned that any change in the zoning would be in place forever---thus, opening the door to all kinds of velvet Elvis sales, etc. should we decide to leave. When the vote was taken, 4 voted for us and 2 against. We were ecstatic.

Two days later, the head of the building department (who was at the zoning meeting and voted FOR our market) called to tell Barry that they had made a "procedural mistake." Even though we were told to go through Zoning, he said we should have presented our proposal to the Planning Commission first. He apologized and was obviously embarrassed to have been selected to be the messenger, but there wasn't much he could do.

Unfortunately, the Planning Commission doesn't meet for another month...pushing things back again...

In the meantime, we've established a couple more contacts with vendors so hopefully that will keep our foot in the produce door for a while longer.

Expanding Mobile Produce Service

We're still here. We have applied for the zoning permit for the permanent location, been rejected, and now have re-applied. Of course, the Zoning Committee only meets once a month so we have to wait until the mid-September meeting to hear anything.
In the meantime, we've been trying to expand our mobile services. Barry and Jeff are still delivering twice a week to the vendors at Findlay Market. The next phase is to start selling to independent restaurants in the Cincinnati area. We have a few leads and will be targeting the sandwich/deli shops and the Mexican restaurants. After all, tomatoes and peppers are our specialties!