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Does anyone use those plastic Bread Trays to take Tomatoes to market? By plastic bread trays I mean the stackable, rigid thick plastic trays that Bakeries use to ship bread to a market. They're very shallow but approximately 2'x2' so you fit a lot of tomatoes in them.
The one vendor at our market that shows up each time with large quantities of produce uses those exclusively. Reason being, they show up with a van, truck and trailer loaded with those stacked up. They then setup a couple tables and put those out on them making an instant nice display of the produce where people can pick their own. I've also noticed a lot of grocery stores seem to sell with shallow plastic crates like these.
Of course to sell this way, you have to weigh the produce. I have resisted doing this because I agree with what people have said here, the weighing takes valuable time and the scales are expensive.
But after 1 market where I took 60 or so pounds of tomatoes and sold only 1 pound selling them in quart baskets I decided to experiment. I took a bread tray my wife got from work with with 50 or so pounds of tomatoes in it. I marked them $1/pound (going price at our market) and took a simple kitchen scale to weigh them. I sold 90% of them with only the more ugly or small ones left.
I think this is just conditioning because my quart baskets had about 1.5-2 pounds of tomatoes in them. The other vendor has trained people to buy this way and I can't do a whole lot about it at least for awhile.
Another issue I face with this other vendor is that their produce always looks good (no flaws) and is pretty uniform in size and appearance. I, so far, have been completely organic so mine tends to be more ugly. I try to compost most things with obvious insect damage but the produce is still very variable in appearance which tends to turn a lot of people off more so than the use of chemicals. So people seem to like picking out what they feel to be the 'best' tomatoes in the lot.
Anyway, I'm just curious about others experiences with this. I know that Bernie will say don't sell things by weight and I completely agree with him, and I'm doing fine with that on everything but Tomatoes. But in no way do my tomatoes look as good as his so I'm trying to adapt to what my customers want.
Also I must admit that late in the day on Friday it's nice not to have to do the extra step of packaging the tomatoes in a basket. I just toss the Bread tray in the pickup, attach a sign and I'm good to go.
Jeff
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