The customer is king. This golden rule of business sounds sensible enough until you start dealing with customers.
For example, what do you do when a customer says he wants a better product from you – and what he wants may not even be possible?
Fred de Martines, a producer of Tamworth and Berkshire pork, spends a lot of time talking to chefs in high-end restaurants in Toronto and southern Ontario and asking what they want. One of the things he heard repeatedly was that they wanted lots of marbling and fat that is white and firm.
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De Martines knew they were asking for the moon. A swine specialist in his native Holland, he’s been breeding pigs on his Sebringville, Ont., farm since 1979.
He knew barley in pig rations gets you firm, white fat, but not much of it because barley is a low-energy ration. Corn will get you nice marbling, but the fat will be yellow. Wheat will get you white fat, but it will be watery.
“It was a challenge,” he said. “I mean, the chefs don’t know what goes into raising a pig. They just know what they want.
“So I asked all these feed specialists what to do. But they didn’t know because their whole focus is on feed conversion and raising a conventional pig in the fastest possible time. They didn’t have a clue what I should do.”
De Martines experimented and came up with a feed regime that produces pigs with the kind of fat the chefs wanted. That wasn’t the last unreasonable request. He is frequently asked if he’ll deliver $50 worth of pork to a restaurant in congested downtown Toronto.
“No problem” is always the reply.
“If you don’t appreciate the small orders, your attitude isn’t right,” said de Martines.
“If you want people to work with you, you’ve got to be willing to work with them. For myself, to say you have to have a minimum order of $150 or whatever just isn’t right.”
De Martines knows tiny, not-worth-the-bother customers can grow into big ones. Several chefs who started with one small order now buy several hundred dollars worth of pork weekly.
But that’s not why he negotiates Toronto’s traffic-clogged streets, scrambling to find a parking spot so he can cart in a little bag of chops through the kitchen entrance.
He wants the conversation. Why did you call me? How are you going to serve these chops? Let me know what your customers say about the darker colour, texture and taste.
When you’re selling pork that goes for $15 per pound in fancy Toronto meat shops and maybe double, or even triple, that for a 10 ounce chop in a white tablecloth restaurant, they are not idle questions.
“If the chef is busy, I’ll talk to the waiting staff or the sous chef or the dishwasher – it doesn’t matter to me,” said de Martines.
“If you want to be successful in my business, you have to have the whole staff on your side. If everyone in the kitchen likes you and the product is what they want, someone can walk into that place with the exact same product and they won’t get the sale.”
Make no mistake. This is not just about salesmanship.
One time, the chef of a big restaurant – big enough to hold six weddings simultaneously – asked de Martines to bring half of a Berkshire carcass to his kitchen. When he arrived, the chef unexpectedly called the staff around and announced de Martines would show them how to cut the carcass to get all the different kinds of cuts they served.
Luckily, de Martines had spent enough time watching his meatcutter and was able to conduct the impromptu butchering demonstration. The chef really wanted to know if this farmer who said all the right things understood his needs.
That’s because treating your customers like kings isn’t about bowing or scraping. It’s about listening. That’s the only way to find out what customers want, need and won’t put up with.
And it doesn’t matter if the customer is a chef with a show on the Food Network, someone who wanders into your farm market or the neighbour you custom-spray for. When a king asks for something, people listen and try to make it happen. Customers expect the same thing.
The de Martines family also sells commodity pork and other rare breeds. Their website is www.perthporkproducts.com
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