Market Manager Relationships & Financial Incentives in D.C. Farmers’ Market Spaces
Interviewer(s): Interviewer
Interviewee(s): Respondent

Interviewer: Yeah. Or in tandem to these three. I'm going to use this as a general guideline for things to talk about, but I probably won't hit all of these questions. I might glance down at the sheet a few times, take some notes. This is just a general structure. How long you've been a market manager in D.C., your experiences, challenges you face, things that have been wonderful, all of it.

Respondent: Okay. I've been a market manager for almost three years now. It feels like it's been longer, but I think it has been. I think it's been three seasons. I did some work at the Fort Mead farmer’s market that was on a military base for a summer. Then, at the University of Maryland market. Then, started at the market in Brookland that's right by the Metro. Then, when Community Food Works came into being, that extended to Columbia Heights and to Arlington. Then, the year after that when we grew a considerable amount, it expanded to Glover Park, Shaw, Rhode Island, Parkside, other stuff. It's up to seven or eight markets now. My schooling background is in agricultural and resource economics from the University of Maryland at College Park with a minor is sustainability studies, and environmental resource policy was the other minor-minor. That's like a major concentration thing. That was essentially, that major was essentially was applied microeconomics and it would broadly touch on food, but it really wouldn't get into the economics and the questions in relationships you think it would due to its name. I guess that's just—

Interviewer: Did you talk about financial incentives at market?

Respondent: No. It was just applied micro.

Interviewer: I got too excited there.

Respondent: Yeah. It would have been too easy for both of us if that would be the case. Any undergrad degree is fine, but I feel like an undergrad degree in economics is huge. It's aware of how much it doesn't actually talk about economics and that kind of stuff. All that stuff I did in school was more related to energy economics and developmental economics. They talk in broad strokes and such during class. I got a part-time job managing a market through one of my professors before I graduated. Through that, the first 3/4th of the first season I worked with, it was really rudimentary exposure to things that went into markets. I did the stuff on market day and I did the bookkeeping and did not touch on of the incentive programming for food access or the outreach or just general nonprofit partnership development was really a part of it. The scope of the job was really small for a while at that time. The first big digest of experience I got was the vendor relations thing and stuff at market and the small windows you have with customers and people. I did get exposed to Produce Plus that way and through WIC and senior checks and food stamps and those sorts of things. Then, the year after that, the budget was rebranded a little bit more as the thing grew to include incentive programming and outreach and that kind of stuff. I had two part-time jobs when I graduated, or two and a half and whittled it down. The other one was also at a nonprofit, but it was in a pretty different one. Then, as my time in the markets went on I met more people in the D.C. scene that did other markets or other food access stuff, got more interested personally in the things that we were talking about today. It's been cool. It's been a pretty deep dive into some parts of it. It's been very concentrated, very fast-paced and very ambitious work environment for a while. It's good. It's good and bad, that kind of thing.

Interviewer: Yeah. Specifically, your work with Community Food Works, can you tell me what the mission is? Why that resonates with you? Why you decided that was a place you wanted to do this kind of work?

Respondent: Community Food Works actually came into existence the season after I started. The brief history of it is that the professor I mentioned that got me the job at the Brookland market had been involved in the original founding of the Columbia Heights market, which predated that by about six years or so. The Arlington Courthouse market, which had been managed for the county for the last 20 or so years put out a bid for another organization to manage it. There was some pretty salient strategic stuff on that where Community Food Works was formed. Columbia Heights had a nonprofit board. It had a working board and no staff for a long time. That nonprofit changed its name to Community Food Works and brought on the Brookland market, and then that entity won the bid for the Arlington market. That was all taken place over an off-season. When the season started up, there was this mission-driven umbrella over these markets which is to create economic opportunities for farmers and food producers in the mid-Atlantic region while also increasing access to fresh and nutritious food. I don’t remember the exact language that's on all the boiler stuff, but the way I articulate it now is fresh, affordable, and nutritious. I don't know if it's pedantic, but it's a little more specific than just saying—because good food to me calls up the image of just a very exclusive, pricey kind of a situation. Healthy food is a broad statement, which works out how the issues are talked about in the political theater. Healthy food, it's a layman, it gets the whole picture across, but no food is healthy. Habits are healthy. Food can be nutritious. When you look at other large food bank or food distributions networks, you lose the quality when you get a lot of scale into it. That's where the fresh and nutritious stuff, that's why those words are good sticking points for me. A lot of the ethos that is at work behind Community Food Works that I feel differentiates it from similar organizations in the space that might share a mission is that we use our nonprofit status to financially leverage and all the stuff like all nonprofits do, but the end is the make the customer experience as equal and equitable as it can across all types of currency or all types of food or all types of distribution channels. Just to lightly touch on the CSA at Columbia Heights, it's a market share CSA or an aggregate CSA, just all words to make it make a little sense. We take stuff from a couple of farmers and aggregate into one bag from week to week.

Interviewer: I get a CSA.

Respondent: Just the ag for market share, tiny details. The way it's pitched is, a traditional CSA is, you buy into one farm or two farms and there's upfront costs and food for the season, but we did ours week to week. Pulling from multiple farms let us have a tiny, tiny, tiny bit of bargaining power. I can get into the whole power relationship later, but it just offered more variety especially because we do keep everything to the mid-Atlantic but someone in middle Pennsylvania still has a really different growing timeline than someone in Virginia. That just let us offer really robust experience to have good stuff all the time. Seasonally, but still.

Interviewer: What's the effect of doing that week to week instead of a traditional CSA where you pay up front?

Respondent: It was removal of another barrier to entry, because if you're in a food or income insecure household, you can't throw own $300 at once for food. You want to do a weekly SNAP thing. You might have $200 in SNAP over the course of four months, but you're not going to spend it all in the beginning of August for everything. It was just positioned so that it was a weekly thing and the cost was put more for transaction, but not entirely up front so it wouldn't exclude a lot of people. A lot of the outreach, I guess, for it took place at market because people would seal the bags and be like, what is this? That was a nice way to pivot it in that way and talk about it. The other benefit of it coming from multiple farms than it coming through another aggregator is that someone could join in June and they wouldn't have to buy in in November or else they would missed out. That half a year window essentially where customers can still add on, especially if you're dealing with people that—if you live in city you probably aren't really familiar with the CSA model, that kind of thing.

Interviewer: What do your relationships look like around those programs? You talked a little bit about outreach, when someone comes and they see a bag and they ask you whether it's a customer who is paying it SNAP or a customer who is just curious. What does that interaction go like? Is it casual? Is it businesslike?

Respondent: It's really casual.

Interviewer: What kinds of conversations come out of that?

Respondent: Literally, mostly people ask, is this free? Can I buy this now? What is this? At someone level, the first thing is a robotic customer service sort of response because you're just trying to get people directed towards the conversation, especially if you're marketing you're doing other stuff and it's kind of chaotic and you're trying to food organized and tables set up, and you're dealing with parking closures and parking stuff. It's just—

Interviewer: Permits.

Respondent: The first issue is, try not to be short with people, that it's a nice environment to talk to people. They're only like, what is this? This is market share CSA. People won't likely talk about that much and it does make you engage with your want to go down the retail route or the food stamp or WIC check route with somebody. So, kind of do that. A lot of the time, after I explained what it was I would be like, if you're interested would you want to hear about the food stamp options or the retail options? I would ask that as nonchalantly as I can. I just don’t want that to be a stopping point or a sticking point. It's just a fork in the conversation. The thing I mentioned earlier that I rambled about was that on the operations side, looking at the whole CSA for a week, you look at all the 80 or 100 orders. The product is all the same. It really just is only differentiated when people come to pick it up. It's the same line, the same information, same data tracking sheets, the same sheets. Unless someone is standing there watching people pull stuff out of their wallets, you won't know if it's a WIC CSA or a food stamp CSA or a retail CSA. That is one of the important optics things for us so that it's the same experience for a lot of people. I'd say only one of our markets is in a higher middle income area. The rest are all in mixed or low income areas. I just will have the same a, b, c of my spiel. I'll just do it for everybody and it's usually is, this is the CSA, or this is the Produce Plus line, or this is the market information table. It's the blanket information statement and then always be like, what type of currency would you want to be using? Essentially it's the same conversation across. That's what I can do on my side and from the at-market outreach side when you're just explaining the program to people that ask it's not really deviating from your talking points no matter who you're talking to.

Interviewer: How does that program look on the other side? You mentioned the bargaining power with the producers. I'm curious about that. That's a business relationship, too.

Respondent: Between this market manager to vendor in a market with no CSA versus—all the vendors we work with for the CSA are in the markets. We work with them in a market manager-vendor context before we were working with them in a wholesale context. There’s an application process for the markets and market guidelines and rules. You do plug people for, I need your paperwork and your food handler stuff and your handwashing station, your insurance certificate. You usually have to follow up with people, because the ag industry is a little more offline than others, so some of it is innocuous, but others it's like, I need your insurance. I've asked you for three months. Come, on dude kind of a thing.

Interviewer: Do you have similar logistical experiences when it comes to programs like CSA or Produce Plus?

Respondent: Yeah. I bring up the guide, because I don't know if it was just my introduction to the market world or if this is unique to the market world, but it's always been a little tricky towing the line, because it is a very social, friendly community focused atmosphere, but you also have to be able to switch over to a very clear business relationship. The clarity of said business relationship is actually not that clear because I haven’t decided or figured out, and it's in flux. If a vendor needs a market more than a market needs a vendor because you can be in a situation where you need a certain product or it would look really bad and just be dumb if you didn't have this vendor in this market based on where they operate and their existing customer base, and your organization’s reputation and your optics on that. There are times where, I don’t want to say it's hard to enforce the rules on that kind of thing, but you're more apt to let things slide or just be a little more lenient with people just due to the nature and the atmosphere of the work. Wholesale is actually a little more cut and dried than at market and that kind of thing, especially if when the managing entity or organization is technically younger than a market or younger than a vendor has been in a market. Even if we did found a market, a vendor could also have had a presence in the neighborhood for longer than either of us. There is one vendor we have that lives in the neighborhood one of the markets is in and has sold at another market that's a way more unorganized farm stand, but still has a lot of community authenticity backing it. Vendors will talk and gossip about market managers and market managing entities, especially if they're in different organizations, markets and such.

Interviewer: How do you navigate those relationships?

Respondent: There are other operators that are for-profit entities that might have more upfront, they would not really have the pretenses about—just an example, if my funding comes from a sponsor, I would be less inclined to pressure someone on their late fees than if market income paid my hourly wage or something like that. If you're a smaller organization starting out and you're relying more on the vendors to help establish things and build the brand and keep things stable for a market, I've seen it in another organization. It's not a farmer’s market organization, but they were growing a lot and they hit a period of size where there was an internal shift with their attitude towards their vendors where, we all got here together but now that we're big enough, we have this perceived authority or we can be pickier and choosier and maybe would cut out someone that we have worked with for three years. That's something that is slow. That's not going to happen week to week that would happen over the course of a season or two. It's not something I think would happen to our organization because there's very frequent communication between the vendors and at market and that kind of thing. We just try to be really cognizant and I try to be really cognizant of how our moves and our markets and partnerships would reverberate in the food community. It's very connected. It's a very interpersonal community. The farmers and similar people have long memories and that kind of thing. People remember their treatment or policies they don’t think are quite fair. Just trying to be really cognizant of all of that up front when you're devising things before you implement them is what we can do, to go back to your question 15 minutes ago. The wholesale stuff is new for us. It was a big learning curve with workflow and communication, all that kind of stuff there would be normally, but we were working with vendors. Farms of all about similar sizes. Some where bigger than others, but they were all fairly medium sized for small diversified operations.

Interviewer: What did that look like? The farms were all the right sizes. They were all similar sizes, but how did that outreach go? What did those interactions look like? How were those relationships built?

Respondent: With the farmers?

Interviewer: Yeah. Or how did you negotiate those prices so that it could be a successful program?

Respondent: All the vendors we had wholesale relationships with were vendors in our markets for season previous. No one that works at Community Food Works was around for the founding of Columbia Heights except for some of the board members, kind of. Across all the markets across the city, Columbia Heights in my opinion is like a unicorn in that of, it's in one of the most dense and diverse areas and is a large market that still is really genuine and authentic, a neighbor of the community. We were really gifted that, just management changes hands season to season and board members that stay on and bring—that's how the market as it is now and it came to us. We also look at that and acknowledge that. We just opened our applications and they'll be closing pretty soon and we're trying to get all our vendor choices locked in within the next month or so. We really, really value working with people year to year. There was one market we came into the management of a number of years after it was founded. We talked to the vendors, we're not going to rock the boat at all. You guys know this area and know the customers and you guys all have followings there. It would be really dumb on our behalf to not utilize that or disrespect it and swap someone out. The vendors that we work with, we've worked with for a while and we prioritize that in our application. The two larger of the three we work with wholesale primarily, two of them were about the same size, which was bigger than the third size. Those farms, they have wholesale accounts with other entities already. We didn't have a lot of kinks to work out because they were used to taking orders and fulfilling them and guesstimating what they have available in two weeks and knowing how much of something actually they—look at the field and look at the haul and be like, that's probably 500 pounds. I can sell you 400, and that kind of thing.

Interviewer: For that third vendor, what did that look like?

Respondent: That was one where stuff was still fulfilled. It was talked or understood about in the off-season with volume and variety and that kind of thing, but the stuff would show up. They got a B-. I don't know. It was fine, but the other experiences were easier. That would just require a little more back and forth in communication with them, the ordering and the delivery period. With the vendors that had wholesale relationships before, it was, what do you have this week? Here's 10 things. All right, I'll have these eight things. All right, that's X amount of dollars. That would just need maybe a few more back and forth with the other vendor. On both sides, the ones that hadn’t done all this other stuff still were snafus every now and then. You'd show up at market and there aren't 300 pounds of sweet potatoes on there. You call the guy and he's like, fuck, I totally meant to put those on there. I'm looking on them right now. I meant to do it. You scramble or substitute it or something like that. They were all really understanding and issues like that are helpful for the most part. I had met with some other market organizers a couple weeks ago, talking about their CSAs. One agreed with their vendors in the off-season that wholesale price will be 60% of whatever their retail is. They would have an upfront, agreed-upon thing, and that's how their pricing would work. Ours, we really would just take the prices from the farmers because we didn't really have a lot of choice. We didn't get squeezed and they're like, it's $10 more a pound more this week because fuck you. That never really happened just because no one really knew that. I guess technically that opportunity would have been there in our relationship where if you have 100 orders to fill on a Wednesday and you're ordering on a Monday, you're working with that. The CSA program itself did generate income with the wholesale price bags or the retail, which would subsidize some of the SNAP stuff using other grant funding or such to help pad both sides a little bit, but we would still lose money some weeks if they things we picked ended up being expensive or we opted to put in two things of blueberries because they were pricy but we wanted to make sure people got blueberries. Sometimes, we would profit off of a week where the numbers would just work out in our favor with the bag makeup and you could walk away with a little money for that order, but it even out over the season. The wholesale relationship is just more, it's a little clearer. It's a little more immediate. The give and take in our relationship is a little bit more clear than someone that's at market.

Interviewer: You mean your customer?

Respondent: Or a vendor at market that's just at market.

Interviewer: I guess to shift gears a little bit and talk about that. You do matching, too, right? Then, Produce Plus, of course. What are some of the experiences that you've witnessed with farmers around those programs, either benefits that they've gotten from the program—

Respondent: Enthusiasm or pushback—

Interviewer: Yeah. I know it's not a one-size-fits-all, every single vendor has the same experience. They're all going to be a little different, but what were some of your experiences seeing that? Especially this past season with a new implementation of Produce Plus.

Respondent: There have been some interactions where vendors and customers have expressed either confusion, whatever is a little less severe than disdain. No one’s been outright, I hate poor people and don’t want to do this, but people would be like, you're changing the business balance. A lot of coded shit like, you're changing the customer balance of our market or attracting the wrong customers and that kind of thing. That does happen a little bit.

Interviewer: What does the coded shit mean?

Respondent: Sorry. Kind of coded language. If someone’s talking about, changing the customer makeup or the clientele, it usually means they're bringing in lower-income people that people perceive can't buy stuff at farmer’s markets. One of our markets we have to have that dialogue with our farmers, but the way that we've turned them around to it is, there's millions of government subsidies out there, so why would you not want that being spent at your thing? No one is super outright and rude about or really ideologically opposed it. It's just new. This is their first exposure to working with our programs and such. That market and in that area, we have pretty basic access programming going on, and it still is looked to as a great example for the region just because it's a different-minded population. A lot of the vendors that we work with, in our market guidelines there's definitions and summaries of types of federal benefits and what they can be spent on and how all the programs work. All of that information is put out up front. With our express mission, it's not really a secret that's what we're doing at all. A lot of that is like, obviously, but it still is a part of the communication.

Interviewer: Is there ever confusion around that?

Respondent: Yeah. It's a lot of different tokens and rules and it gets kind of annoying sometimes. So, definitely there is confusion. We have three different color kinds of tokens, and there's three different color kinds of checks. Keeping it straight and keeping the matching stuff kind of thing. I can talk about that in a sec. The other thing is when they're just thinking about how this presentation and the communication around this is present in the application opening process and recruitment process because that's how we get a lot—we opened a lot of new markets and we had to do a lot of recruiting. We talked to tons of vendors. You go to tasting events around the city to meet people making value add stuff, little food products or prepared products. You pretty much ask every farmer you know the names of every farmer they know and that kind of thing. It's all really referrals and such. You word of mouth will get introduced to a lot of people, but there is an application. A lot of the people we work with, I haven’t ever really identified and targeted, recruited a vendor. It's more people kind of self-select to apply or they get referred by someone that already supports the programs and ideology and everything. I'll do a little networking to make sure application announcements go out on listservs for the Maryland Department of Ag and specialty crop box and that kind of thing. If I hear from one famer, I don't know if the number of farmers that scrolled past our listing and was like, I don’t deal with that. I just see the person that's self-selected to reach out to us. Another thing we do our application through is an online process, but it also functions with a public registry of markets. The vendor will look at markets by zip code and such. They'll look geographically they'll see name of market by Community Food Works and it has the rules up there that has all the access stuff in there. I don’t have any metrics on people that look at this stuff and then don’t follow through and that kind of.

Interviewer: I'm not asking for them.

Respondent: At market—

Interviewer: Tell me about the tokens.

Respondent: Yeah. That was the whole point of the thing. We use tokens for food stamps at market and for the incentives for other types of currencies. The three major ones we deal with are food stamps, SNAP, EBT, whatever the name you prefer is, WIC checks, and then senior checks. The WIC checks and the senior checks are only good for produce, fruits and vegetables, and they're actual legal tender checks. When people spend those, they just spend those right with the farmer, and the farmer does some registration thing with the Department of Health because that's who issues the checks. They can just deposit them in their bank like a regular check. There is a lot of bureaucratic stuff behind the point of sale systems for food stamps. In light of that, instead of requiring every—you can use food stamps for more things than just produce. Instead of requiring every vendor that sells an applicable good to do the really annoying online paperwork thing and wait three months for approval and then go get the actual point of sale that's specifically only for food stamps and then deal with all of that, we do that for market. When someone comes and spends their food stamps, the technical point of sale in the eyes of the funds happens to us. It goes to us and we give them tokens which are the fake money within our market world that they can use at those vendors or markets in our other networks, that kind of thing. The benefit spending is either the SNAP tokens gotten through doing actual transaction and the PIN number with representation in market, the info table. Or the WIC checks or the senior checks. The benefits all just get spent that way. The language around fundraising and grants for incentives for those benefits being spent is tied to the spending of the benefits. It's not just, you have food stamps. Here's extra money. It's like, here's a dollar-for-dollar for match for spending your food stamps. Because the actual point of sale is with us, when I do the card and get the tokens for SNAP, at the same time, we give them the extra tokens that are a different color to differentiate for accounting reasons. You come, you earn $10 off your card. I'll give you $20 in tokens and you can use those, save them week to week, that kind of thing. It's a little more awkward with the checks because the check has to be spent for the tokens to happen. Because we can't staff all the cash registers at all the growers that might be getting checks, what we do is, we have language set aside in the guidelines and just conversations and understanding beforehand that when someone brings one of these checks to you, we will give you little paper receipts that match the dollar amount of the type of check. You go up to the farm. You spend $5 of WIC. You get your stuff back from the vendor that you pay for, and you get a receipt that says $5 in WIC. You would take that receipt back to the info table and I would give you the tokens for that. So, there's just that extra step, just the two extra transactions there.

Interviewer: What do customer interactions around that back or forth or around that initial exchange, if it's an EBT card, what does that typically look like? What does that feel like? How do those relationships go? If they're new people, what are the questions they ask?

Respondent: We do targeted low-income outreach for our programs before the season starts and the beginning of the season where we'll reach out to other social service organizations that are dealing with similar populations. I'll try and find my counterpart in there and start a conversation and be like, hey, we have this market that's right by your clinic or right by your health provider or anything like that. We have these programs and resources available for people to use benefits. If any of your clients do use these and would be benefitted from them, I'm happy to come talk to you or give you materials. It's just a really simple information postcard. It's like, here's a map, time, and date. Come and spend your SNAP. We double it. That's it. Stuff like that is a pull. It pulls people to market. Some people will come up to me at the table and be like, I got this thing. How can I do it? Then, you just help them through the process. You can spend food stamps with these vendors, not with that vendor. You can choose however much you want to spend and then we'll do the match, and we'll do it with these tokens and you can keep these week to week and use them next month, next season, today, whatever. That's normally how that goes, and we just keep the nice customer service face on kind of thing. People really like the doubling, and it's a really big leg up over Giant or Safeway or something for a number of reasons. We'll get a lot of return customers and you get to know the people that are coming to market, unless your market is big and then it's just people after people. If it's a medium sized market and you have 10 SNAP customers, you can remember them and hang out. If they want to. If they want to offer more conversation, it's a nice way to just naturally talk to people as you would with people. The other interesting thing, which is a tiny bit present with the markets, but then super present when you add Produce Plus in the mix is that the info table is used for advertising events and newsletter signups, just general info. On behalf of our vendors that don't have credit card readers, just for whatever their reasons are, we can do that with our point of sale stuff. So, we can be a market ATM. You’ll have people that are shopping at retail. They don’t qualify for benefits, and they come to the information table looking for tokens, but they would be credit card tokens. They usually just ask. If someone is like, I need tokens for the crepes, you know that it's a prepared food vendor or that couldn't accept SNAP, therefore credit card. It's just people you see week to week or you do, sometimes we judge them a little bit when they approach and that kind of thing. The transactions are still the same, treated still the same way. Sometimes, if you're dealing with a line, depending on whatever side has the line, we'll have manager at the table and couple volunteers. so, they'll be more than on person there and you can help manage the line while someone else is doing a transaction or doing data tracking or whatever. If you're using SNAP you can just come up to the front because this line is for credit cards. If you're here to double WIC, you don’t have to wait in line for SNAP. You can just come up and we'll do it and that kind of thing.

Interviewer: With Produce Plus—

Respondent: With Produce Plus, people would have to wait in line for that. At some of our markets, really significantly at a lot of markets all over the city, there's two sides to the bad part of the line, or the ugly part of the line. One is the people that are there for Produce Plus and there's just 200 people there for 120 checks. You still have to line up. The people that will get a check are still going to be ornery because it's July and you're waiting outside in the sun. The person that's 151st in line for 150 checks will be pissed because they waited. We developed the system over the season essentially deli counter numbers and trying to order the line. It will get out of control because people would, it was just communication with the realties of the program. They think even if I had number four and you had number two, it was still better to have number two even though there's checks for 30 people and it doesn't really matter if you're third or you're fourth. I guess it does matter if you're third or if you're 30th just because it's that extra half an hour standing around waiting. All of that factors into the line being a tense thing for everybody involved, really. It really would, at the popular markets, it really would be a spectacle. You would have just 200 people in line, which is a lot of people on a sidewalk. That was situation where more than once, people would come up and make disparaging comments or just super ignorant comments. They'd be like, is this market only for poor people? It's like, I'm not deaf. Do I really want to talk to you if you're going to just come up out of nowhere and say that to a stranger? Of course, I wouldn't just cold shoulder some random that asked that question. You would kindly, tersely explain to them what's going on and that kind of thing. They would even be like, oh okay. That sucks. Or that's cool. Or, why are you doing that? That would just be pertinent to whatever their beliefs were, attitudes were. Those reactions, those unsavory or uncomfortable conversations definitely did happen over the summer when you would have a big line. I guess it would call attention to the fact that sorry poor people exist in your neighborhood. People would make comments about that as they were walking by or they would ask about it in an insensitive way. The program itself, Produce Plus is a citywide program. There's a lot of brains on it. The line is the question for everyone involved because it's not a really dignified or enjoyable experience for everybody on either side. As things are now with how the distribution system has to work, it's kind of a reality for a little bit.

Interviewer: How, in terms of managing the market and managing the relationships with vendors and producers and customers that weren't receiving Produce Plus, did you work as a team to manage that relationship? Was there one person that was consistently delegated to do Produce Plus? Like, man the line? What did that look like for you guys?

Respondent: A typical day at market, they'll be a market manager and they'll be some volunteers. The volunteers are put in place to do menial stuff at the info, teach volunteers to do the transactions with the point of sale system and stuff. I don’t have to stay in there the whole day. I can help vendors with stuff, talk to them because it's really good to make face time with ag people. Also, just go around the market and—you're really just troubleshooting if anything goes wrong. The whole day, that's really your job. I'm trying to think if there's examples that I could specifically tell you about where—

Interviewer: Yeah. I'm wondering what happens to the line at that time.

Respondent: The line is just kind of there, really.

Interviewer: But who mans the line?

Respondent: That would be us. Managers. That would be us. We would have a small group of volunteers that were connected to us specifically for Produce Plus by other organizations. The managing organization, BC Greens, had The Brigade. I'm at Columbia Heights. I'm the manager. There's 10 vendors. There's me. There's another CFW staff person. There's two of our volunteers that are just, they volunteer at the market. Then, there's four Brigade volunteers. So, you put the Brigade volunteers on all the transaction stuff with Produce Plus, running the app, writing the checks, doing all of that. Experienced volunteers or staff can kind of corral the line depending on how large it is. We would hand out numbers for everybody and try and keep them all in line. You call people one by one to a couple different stalls or cash registers, the different things. It's a pretty hectic thing, honestly. Even when it's running well, it's a hectic and loud thing. What was really surprising was, there was a lot/too much self-policing with the line going on. If there's a line of 30 people, 28 would keep number and 27 and 29 in check, almost. People would call out other people trying to cut in line. There were tensions that arose among the different groups of people that were utilizing and receiving Produce Plus a little bit.

Interviewer: What does that mean?

Respondent: Just trying to be super PC with that kind of thing. It was a lot of, from certain—man, I can't pleasantly say it. Is that fine?

Interviewer: Yeah. Of course.

Respondent: Just with the bartering culture and I guess the queuing culture from countries in Asia. You deal with China—it was China, from Viet Nam, from Korea and such. It’s a different culture of queuing and markets and that kind of thing. You would have people that were just white or Hispanic or African-American that were in line. Language barrier was a thing when you were dealing with someone who’s probably 80 and doesn't have a lot of English to work from. Doing the numbers and all that stuff was hard and the order in line and calling numbers. It was kind of a tricky thing. People would get kind of heated about people cutting in line. People did cut in line and did try to game the system a little bit, I think, way less than people would have thought. I thought most of that stuff was probably just mistakes or confusion or language barrier thing. It wasn’t as much maliciousness as people would say. There was a fresh farm market where there were the cops got called and seniors fighting and pushing each other. It got kind of bad at those sites.

Interviewer: If you're a market manager during that—

Respondent: It's really just de-escalation. That's really all it is. We would deal with that in Columbia Heights because we'd have a line. We'd have enough checks for 250 people and we would run out every day. So, we had a huge line. It wasn’t really pretty, but we really had to direct the line down the sidewalk out of the market because if it was in the market it would just crowd all the tents. The market’s on a civic plaza that gets a lot of cross traffic anyway. It just would clog the sidewalks, so it was better to do it one sidewalk. That also had seating and shade and that kind of thing, which was better, but it still was super visible. There wasn’t really a good way to deal with it.

Interviewer: When people in that visible space where interacting in ways that were either culturally clashing or clashing with just the language barrier, how did you as a market manager mitigate the situation?

Respondent: You would come in and break—I didn't really have to personally break anything up, but people would be yelling at each other. I'd just try to calm people down. Get their attention, ask what was the actual problem. A lot of the stuff was just really enforcement or misunderstanding of the rules or the number system or the line. If somebody was clearly trying to game the system a little, you could call them out and tell them, you have to follow these rules to be in this program. Just reiterating that was enough. Very few people would bicker with you or fight with you. They'd be like, yeah, okay. It's weird. I'm kind of good at doing this, but I can't tell you how.

Interviewer: That's why I'm interviewing people, because everyone seems to have that experience.

Respondent: Yeah. There was this time two years ago, there was a meat vendor that was selling frozen stuff by the pound. They would use the calculator on their scale, you can picture in your head, but the scale wasn’t the right kind of scale because it had the display on one side and not both sides and it wasn’t inspected. The D.C. regulatory consumer affairs came and did scale inspections, like, you have to stop selling with this scale. You have to get it inspected and bring it back. It was really dumb on the vendor’s side, because he was like, okay. Then, the inspector went to the next stall and then the vendor took the scale out again and starting using it, and the inspector came back and was like, dude, I'm going to fine you. I literally told you to not do that. He like, it's a $3,000 fine to not do that. I went and talked to the guy and then he left. I don’t really know exactly what I said. I don't know.

Interviewer: That's okay.

Respondent: Really not helpful.

Interviewer: The fact that you had the conversation is the helpful part.

Respondent: Yeah. It's very on the fly, very verbal, very interpersonal. With your expression, your tone of voice, your demeanor, your posture. You would just try to be very firm. Firm, not aggressive. Most people can piece together that you're trying to help and you do get a little slack and benefit of the doubt if you're also sweating in July to do this stuff. People aren't going to get as mad at you if it was like, I'm in this air-conditioned office I have and I go outside and wait with the other people and crap like that. That's really about my answer. Just talking with everybody like they're the same. People are all people. Most everyone probably wants the same thing if they realize it or not. People honestly with respect the line and the numbers and that kind of thing. This ran from June through the end of September. So, people would get in habits. The people that would come back all the time or they'd come back in inclement weather, they appreciated the well-run line or a cordial environment and understood that if everyone’s happy and just chills out, everything runs better for everybody in the end. As the season went on, it was a lot easier to manage it. In June and July when there was like, oh, there's six times as people here as I originally thought. Shit. That was tense. That was harder to deal with. It just ended up devolving into yelling and corralling and trying to shout over people, especially if you're just trying to talk to 60 people on the sidewalk in Columbia Heights at once. It's kind of hard, but when you're talking to 30 people that are nicer, they're not as

Interviewer: They know they're going to get their chance.

Respondent: Yeah. There were some exogenous things with the program and the funding and the size and the perceive scarcity and that kind of thing. That was also, I'm sure, a factor, because someone’s going to one market—if you're at your third market of the Saturday morning because the first two ran out of checks and you're taking a bus all over town or you had your friend drive you, you're be a little bit more terse than if you were earlier. All the troubleshooting. This current off-season there is so much workshopping and dialogue happened about that, which will be really good for the program. I think at the end it will run very smoothly compare to last season. Just having really standardized policies for line rules and that kind of thing, because were we doing the numbers because we didn't know what else to do. Then, when we have our weekly meeting, our monthly meeting or bimonthly meeting with all the other markets in the city, they're like, oh that's a great idea. I'll do that. But there's the lags and there's like, I go to this market and they do tokens this way. Or, I go to the market over there and they run the line like that here. Why is that not happening at this market? Then, you have to just politely and firmly be like, this is our market by our organization and this is our rules. The other ones, I can't be responsible for your experience at a different market. Nationally, the tokens is a pretty ubiquitous thing. Almost all the markets in D.C. have that. There are three pretty obviously discernable types of tokens. Ours are plastic and say either our market’s name or Community Food Works and Fresh Farms. Or wooden say Fresh Farms. I think markets are more wooden. I think we're the only ones with plastic tokens. That was also another thing where people would come to the info table and they would have their pouch full of tokens and would have tokens from a couple different markets. I'd have to say, hey I recognize that token. I know that comes from a market in another part of the city, but it's not organized by our organization, so you can only use the plastic ones here. But the Produce Plus is good all the way across the city, or your checks are good all the way around the city. It's pleasantly offering all the options while still discussing—

Interviewer: Were people receptive to that?

Respondent: Yeah. There was one person in one of our markets where the token system was a repeated issue. I honestly think that was a language thing or another issue. That was out of our control. The other funny is the communication of what tokens you can accept and how to double them and that kind of thing and how the understanding of that changes from vendor to vendor. Again, from vendors where it's a smaller operation and your owner is the sales person, therefore they're the ones that are getting all the communication versus I'm working with a bakery that goes to four markets so I'm like, I did all the application stuff and pre-season things with one person, but they're not going to be at market. I have to reiterate everything at market where my baker is taking tokens only for fruits and vegetables. I have to be like, well this time I'll give you $20, but next time you can't do it. They either learn or they keep doing it wrong or they keep it doing it wrong and they're trying to just get money out of you. It doesn't really happen that often, but probably happens more than zero times. There's opportunity for confusion to the tokens on both sides of the interaction. If you're a customer that might be new to it or has used SNAP but hasn’t gone to the markets or something, it's a confusing extra step to learn and that kind of thing. Even teaching our volunteers the program, it still takes a while. You have to study the stuff, because it is kind of confusing, but there isn't a super better way to do it, because it's so hard to standardize a point of sale across these vendors that are in multiple markets and are their own entities and their own things. That just makes it harder to do. The band-aid is fine but it still could use improvement. Another thing that, I don't know if I said or you might not know that is an interesting thing to consider with the vendor, the manager relationship is that we do really need those fees from their sales reporting even though we have subsidies from other grants and stuff. We still really need that vendor income, and we ask them to report their own numbers on the honor system. If you look at someone’s sales reporting for the month and it's like, you made $800 five weeks in a row. Cool. One side is like, you're old and you don’t use computers. You're running business on paper records and you don’t really actually know or you don’t keep records and you're guessing, or you're fudging it a little to pay less. I think they're all equally likely. I'm also too nice sometimes, so it's probably mostly the I want to pay less money thing. That's another thing. We need vendors for markets. They need us for markets, sort of. We need to have a pretty solid interpersonal relationship because the rules and the sales reporting and the money is on the honor code a little bit. It's just a weird space to navigate. What we're trying to do, one of our markets has guidelines that are partially dictated and grandfathered by an organization that we're contracted to work with. So, there are some things—there's the Food Works guidelines and Food Works Plus, this other entity and that kind of thing for that certain market. Our rules are not the same all across the board. Some sourcing restrictions are way stricter for one market compared to another market. You said you volunteered at Fresh Farms? They're very big on the producer only side of it. We sort of do that. It's language like, we strongly encourage producer only because we're going to break it when we have to wholesale food and resell it ourselves in a food desert or something like that. It's not like I just made the guidelines up. We talk about it internally a lot, and there still are a lot of exceptions to stuff. You make concessions when—if I've worked with vendor A for five years, it's hard to enforce a one-year policy, that kind of a thing. I don't know. You do have to be a firm manager. You just have to decide where that line is that you do have to push back on someone or worry they would be mad or not. They'll get over it. There's a lot of characters at farmer’s markets and people are kind of weird in a good way, but you know that.

Interviewer: Okay. Is there anything else you want to tell me about your interactions with people around financial incentives?

Respondent: Not really. I can think of one vendor who sold products that didn't qualify for SNAP, and the vendors just think all tokens are the same, normally. I have had to—a vendor that we've worked with a while, had a great working relationship with, and I was still teaching them about the programs a little bit at market. They were like, that's great. I really think they responded really positively and they're really supportive of the idea and the mission. They would be happy when they had a lot of tokens at the end of the day, because they have really nice meat and really nice eggs and cheese, and they were glad that quality food was going out to people that typically don’t have access to it. Like I said, with other people where we've had to frame it around, there's all that government money out there waiting to be bought. You shouldn't be averse to new customers or new populations coming to your market, that kind of thing. They were a little wary, a little less enthused about it, but have kind of come around in a longer time frame. I've had a vendor say that they heard about us through someone else and when they checked out our website, they really liked the branding and the language and that kind of thing, but no one’s ever said, I want to sell with you because you do incentive program and I appreciate your work. They've sort of said it, or you guys do have—from that specific instance, it's like, you were recommended by someone I trust. So, I do like you and then it was just all confirmed when I checked out your website and saw your online presence and how you present yourselves and that kind of thing. It's good to always have that—I would never hide the fact that access is the point of Community Food Works. If you're dealing with stakeholders or clients’ health for a higher income market, you do with to reframe it a little bit and be like—this is something that I would think to myself, but might not say them. Literally the fact that this market’s in our network is a subsidy for another market somewhere else. I can just say to people in higher income neighborhoods that are maybe not super jazzed about donating or that kind of thing and just say, you can turn it the other way and you're supporting local farmers and small businesses and that kind of thing. That should happen. I'm not saying that that shouldn't happen, but it's just the two sides of access. It's equal, equitable food justice, food sovereignty access, and access to literally money and livelihood compared to a giant commodity farm or Wal-Mart or something like that. The emotional appeal is real on both sides. It's just, you'd have to frame a little bit, depending on your audience and where they are.

Interviewer: Okay.

Respondent: Yeah. I would say 80% of the people that I have those sorts of conversations with respond like they're happy that these programs exist because they live in a progressive town, etc. That kind of thing.

Interviewer: Okay.

Respondent: I kind of rambled.

Interviewer: No. I really appreciate your experience.