“Beyond the Market” Premieres at InTents
PCFMA’s popular YouTube channel, Beyond the Market, featuring farm tours and cooking demonstrations, took center stage at InTents, the international farmers market conference in March 2025.
Led by Chris Ball, PCFMA’s Assistant Marketing Director, and with contributions by PCFMA Marketing Specialists Johanna Klaiman and Vanessa Parham, the presentation showcased how video marketing drives customer visits to PCFMA’s farmers markets. They shared strategies for integrating video marketing into social media, tracking online engagement translated into in-person farmers market visits, and offered tips for other markets looking to expand their video marketing strategies.
The project, funded by a USDA Farmers Market Promotion Program grant, grew out of a pandemic-era Specialty Crop Block Grant (SCBG) from the California Department of Food and Agriculture. The SCBG was originally awarded to PCFMA in November 2018 and focused on providing educational field trips to PCFMA’s farmers markets in the San Francisco Bay Area. In March 2020, just as PCFMA was ramping up for its second and final full year of field trips, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the closure of schools and the cancellation of field trips. With the support of CDFA, PCFMA’s marketing team which had been leading the field trip project, pivoted to providing live online and pre-recorded video content for local elementary school classrooms. That marked PCFMA’s first foray into video communications with its customers.
Stefan Robinson, PCFMA’s Marketing Director, emphasized the project's impact on their communication strategy. “CDFA's support during the pandemic's early months was crucial. It allowed us to repurpose SCBG funds for equipment and software, enabling us to create our first cooking and farm tour videos. The positive response of those videos fueled our pursuit of the USDA FMPP grant. These videos have now been seen over 3,000,000 times, introducing our farmers and markets to new audiences." The FMPP grant facilitated the creation of 18 farm tour videos and 36 cooking demonstration videos that are now hosted on YouTube under the “Beyond the Market” banner and throughout PCFMA’s website.
At the InTents conference, the marketing team demonstrated how QR codes that were embedded in video descriptions drove market visits. Customers could redeem these codes at their local farmers market information booths where it would be scanned and exchanged for “Carrot Cash” usable at within the market. The QR codes were redeemed over 5,000 times, demonstrating videos effectiveness at motivating famers market shopping.
Although the FMPP grant has concluded, PCFMA continues to leverage video marketing to drive farmers market shopping, implementing new strategies based on lessons learned from the two-year project.
Chris Ball stated “Video is the fastest growing content type across all social media. We’re all excited to have the opportunity to use video tools to tell our farmers’ stories through this project. We plan to keep doing that while also expanding to tell the stories of some of the incredible food artisans whose products can only be found at farmers markets. We may even have a few of them work with us to record cooking demonstrations showing how to combine their products with farmers market produce for a delicious meal.”
Robinson reiterated this commitment. “We love our farmers and markets. These grants have provided a powerful new way to share that passion, and we're eager to continue telling the stories of our farmers market family.”
