"Marketing Beyond Vermont" Update

Last year at the 2018 VFN Annual Meeting we had a panel presentation on "Marketing Beyond Vermont" with a focus on food tourism. Notes from that session are found here. 

A lot has happened since that time! 

For one thing, we hadn't finished the DigInVT.com rebuild back then. . . we hadn't even collected members' updated information for the site, that's how long ago a year was. The new site went live at the end of February in 2018. VFN Partner Members can read quarterly reports on the site's marketing performance from their member login. As part of reporting on the site launch, we also pulled together this short report on farms participating in agritourism in Vermont (from October, 2018): Results-Agritourism-Survey-Oct-2018.pdf

We worked with Lisa Chase and Hilary DelRoss, plus others involved in food tourism, to develop this brief summary of programs and organizations available to help Vermont food producers interested in tourism opportunities - significantly more than we had time to discuss in a panel session: Agritourism-List-of-Resources-2018-Handout-Format.pdf

Through the new VFN Conference Program we were able to send two people to the Slow Food Nations event in Denver that Mara Welton mentioned in her remarks. Bill Cavanaugh (Mad River Food Hub) and Claire Georges (Butterfly Bakery of Vermont) both highly recommend this gathering. You can read a commentary from Claire in this post from Vermont's Local Banquet. 

At the end of 2018, VFN took on a co-chair position in the Farm to Plate Agritourism Task Force - the other chair is Lisa Chase from UVM Extension. This task force is open to anyone interested in joining, it holds quarterly meetings in different parts of the state, and is an opportunity to discuss how to create a strong future for an agritourism sector in Vermont. For more information and to sign up for the listserv, visit the Farm to Plate website. 

We still want to know what interests our members most in marketing. If you are a VFN Partner Member and you have not yet fill out our marketing survey, we hope you will take a minute to do so! It will really help us plan future activities. The survey is found here  and is also linked from 2019 membership renewal forms.