What Easter told us about our customers

Every year, Easter catches us a little by surprise — not because we don't see it coming in the calendar, but because of what it reveals about the people who order from us.

This year, like previous years, we noticed a significant dip in orders over the Easter long weekend. At first glance it looked like a bad week. But when we dug into the data including previous years, we found something more interesting: our customers weren't gone. They were just away.

The Easter dip, it turns out, has almost nothing to do with how people feel about organic food. It has everything to do with where people are. Our customers travel for Easter — to family, to the countryside, to places that aren't their usual neighbourhoods. Their pickup point is empty not because they've lost interest, but because they're not there to collect.

We could see this clearly when we looked at which of our pickup points stayed busy over Easter and which ones went quiet. The pattern made sense: the locations serving people who tend to stay put over the long weekend held steady. The ones serving people who travel — especially families with school-age children — saw the sharpest drops.

Understanding why the dip happens changes how we can respond to it.

What we've started doing — and what we're genuinely proud of — is paying close attention to customers we haven't heard from in a while. Not in an automated, impersonal way. But in the way a good market stallholder notices a regular face hasn't been around lately.

After Easter this year, we are going through our customer list carefully. We looked at people who have been ordering regularly before the holidays but haven't placed an order since. For newer customers in particular — people who had only ordered once or twice before Easter — we knew from experience that a break like this can sometimes become permanent, not out of any conscious decision, but simply because the habit hasn't fully formed yet. We want to help people remember us as a legitimate choice when considering their food options.

So we are getting in touch. A personal message, a phone call, meetings at pickup points, acknowledging the break and inviting our customers back. 

We're a small farm business. We don't have the marketing budget of a supermarket or the logistics of a meal delivery service. What we do have is a genuine relationship with the people who buy from us, and historical information that helps us understand them better.

The honest truth is that losing a customer — especially a new one who's just starting to build a routine around fresh organic produce — costs us far more than any single missed order. Building that habit, earning that trust, takes time. An Easter break shouldn't undo it.

We think being proactive about this is part of what it means to run a farm business in 2026. Our growers work hard to produce food that's worth coming back for. The least we can do is make sure people find their way back.

This year's analysis has shaped how we're thinking about next Easter already (and other holidays for that matter). We're planning to reach out to newer customers before the holidays — not to push a sale, but simply to let them know what's happening with their usual pickup point over the long weekend, and to make it easy to plan ahead or pause their order intentionally rather than just drift away.

Small things. But in a business built on regulars, small things matter enormously.