How Holiday Markets and pre-orders can lead to a successful year

Many food businesses make a big chunk of their yearly profits during the holiday season, especially those who offer seasonal goodies like pies, holiday cookies, and even fully catered festive meals. Even if you don’t regularly sell your goods at farmers markets, you may want to consider vending at a few holiday time markets and offering a pre-order to help set you up for a successful year of business.

Holidays – time to capture new customers

While not everyone regularly buys baked goods or thinks to order from a local chefs throughout the rest of the year, people are often open to spending money on some special bites during the holiday season. That means there are a lot more potential customers seeking out what you’re selling during these two months than the rest of the year. Take advantage of the season by showing up in person at markets and putting up holiday pre-orders on Hotplate. That way you can get these new customers into your system and market to them throughout the next year.

Crafting a holiday menu

Think about the flavors of the holidays: pumpkin, spices, eggnog, peppermint…yum! When crafting your menus for the holiday season, think about the flavors that your customers expect and will be excited to see. Choose one of your popular menu items and give it a holiday twist. Customers also love to see new and creative combinations of expected flavors. Maybe a cinnamon sourdough? A peppermint mocha cinnamon bun? Get creative!

Where can I find holiday markets to vend at?

Because in-person markets serve your local community, you’ll want to look towards local Facebook groups, Instagram pages, and apps like Nextdoor. Your city our county’s website may also share a calendar of events put on by local groups. It’s also a good idea to ask your fellow business owner friends about markets they’ve attended or had success at.

Display your QR code, grow your customer base for the rest of the year

One of the best reasons to do a holiday market is to get meet new potential customers face to face. Many customers will attend holiday markets in search of gifts even if they don’t regularly attend farmer’s markets. This is the time to give out samples, tell your story, and make people fall in love with you and your food.

This is also the right time to encourage anyone who is excited about your food to stay connected through joining your Hotplate SMS list. We recommend printing out a poster, handout, or business cards that prominently display a QR code that leads to your Hotplate storefront.

Encourage everyone to scan the QR code and add their phone number to your SMS list so that they can be notified about your future sales throughout the rest of the holiday season or the year. This is a great way to keep track of all the people you met at the market, and keep them coming back to order from your drops, even if you’re not at a market.

Offer holiday market pre-orders for markets

The number one way Hotplate chefs utilize our platform in conjunction with their markets is by offering a market pre-order. Chefs create a menu of the items they plan to bring to their booth then publish a pre-order event for that week, listing the market date and time as the pickup location. Let’s get into the advantages:

Guarantee sales

If you’ve done markets often, you’re probably familiar with the guessing game of predicting how many of each item to bring. Especially when it comes to in person events, attendance can vary from week to week based on weather, traffic, seasons, and sometimes seemingly no reason at all! We hear all the time about how disheartening it is to have a bunch of beautiful goods leftover at the end of the day – all that time and money down the drain!

Now, imagine having confidence about the quantities you’re going to sell showing up to a market already knowing that half your stock is sold. Better yet, imagine that the money is already in your account!

By setting up a pre-order, you not only can better forecast how many items to make, but also relieve some stress during the event.

Make customers happy

If you run a popular booth, your regular customers might struggle to get hands on their favorite item if they show up late. By allowing your devoted customers to pre-order holiday goodies, they can be sure that their items are reserved and waiting for them, regardless of when they arrive. That’s a good customer experience!

Use Hotplate for walk up ordering

Whether or not you’re offering a pre-order, you can also use Hotplate to accept walk up orders and take payments. This is super easy to do, and we go into more detail on the steps to set that up in this article.

The bottom line

Whether you’re just entering the market circuit for the holiday season or for good, adding a Hotplate pre-order and utilizing our other features can help boost the payoff from your in person event!