A great booth won’t help if you pick a bad farmers market, and a great product won’t matter if you can’t attract people to your booth. That’s one of the messages from a recent conversation between Daniel Scharff and Elliot Sharifi, Founder of Obour Foods—a premium dip brand built primarily through farmers markets.
Elliot started at a single San Francisco market in 2018 and now earns 7 figures from his CPG brand through farmers markets, running 20+ markets every weekend across NorCal, SoCal, and Sacramento, building one of the most scaled and systemized farmers market operations in CPG along the way.
He joined us last month to walk through the make-or-break decision behind that growth—market selection—plus how to build a booth that actually converts and turns farmers markets into a real growth engine rather than a hobby. Here’s what he covered.
What Determines If a Market is Worth Your Table
Markets can be good or bad – some lost him money because the revenue was less than the labor, but others pulled in $3,000 in five hours. What separates the two comes down to a handful of factors he vets before ever signing up:
1. Foot traffic – a dense, busy market will always outperform a quiet one, regardless of how good the product is.
2. Competition – before applying, Elliot checks who else at that market sells something similar. You generally don’t want competition in a market, and established competitors will out earn a newcomer.
3. Vibe and affluence – are people there with intention to buy, or just to browse? Shoppers with more disposable income are more open to a premium price, but Elliot’s found that clearly communicating why a product costs more than the guy next to you matters more than the price gap itself.
4. Category fit – staples that don’t last long in a grocery store (fresh bread, dips, anything better eaten same-day) tend to do best. Elliot’s advice for founders tempted to use a market purely as a test kitchen: it’s not the ideal venue for that.
Your Booth Is a Funnel, Not Just a Table
Elliot’s central framework: every weak market has a constraint, and the job is finding it before blaming the market.
He maps the booth to six stages—Stop, Taste, Understand, Buy, Return, Learn—each tied to a specific job (attention, product, message, offer, retention, iteration). The question is never just “how much did we sell?” It’s “where did people fall out of the funnel?”
Stop: You Have About Three Seconds to Earn It
1. Lead with a concrete invitation. “Free hummus samples” beats clever copy at twenty feet.
2. One message per sightline. Product, offer, and brand should be readable without stopping first.
3. Remove visual friction. Height, contrast, clean edges, and an open table make approaching feel easy.
Clarity first. Personality second.
Taste: Sampling Is the Sales Process, Not a Giveaway
Elliot runs every sample through a four-step sequence:
- Invite — offer the easiest yes.
- Observe — notice the reaction.
- Ask — one useful question.
- Recommend — make the choice simple.
A sample without a next step is just food cost.
Understand: If Customers Have to Ask Why You’re Different, You’re Late
Elliot vets his differentiation copy against three filters:
- Specific — “Organic chickpeas. Never canned.”
- Meaningful — “We grind our own tahini every week.”
- Believable — “Made in our San Francisco kitchen.”
Sell the difference the customer can taste, value, or repeat.
Pricing: Keep It Consistent Across Every Channel
A common misconception is that cutting out the middleman at a farmers market means lower prices. It doesn’t. Booth fees typically run $50-$150 per market, staff costs stack on top, and once delivery logistics are added in, Elliot’s found the profit margin ends up close to what he’d make selling wholesale.
His pricing rule: keep the end price within about a dollar of whatever the product sells for on a grocery shelf. Undercutting retail partners—or letting retail undercut the booth—trains customers to hunt for the cheapest version of a product, which isn’t a habit worth building around a premium item.
Elliot builds his price architecture around three jobs, each solving a different part of the funnel’s Buy stage:
1. Entry — one unit, priced for an easy first purchase.
2. Basket — a bundle or volume discount that gives customers a reason to buy more right now.
3. Return — a jar credit that gives customers a reason to come back.
The pricing sign should close questions, not create them.
Getting In: Permits, Insurance, and Commitment
Before a founder can set foot behind a table, most markets want to see:
1. A state or local producer permit – requirements vary by city and county.
2. Liability insurance – typically with a $2 million minimum aggregate.
3. Automobile insurance – required if delivery vehicles are involved.
4. Workers’ comp – needed if staff are hired, though less commonly enforced.
One thing Elliot flags for first-timers: markets generally aren’t looking for a one-off tryout. Once accepted, a vendor is expected to show up consistently—and markets tend not to kick people out unless a rule is broken.
If sales aren’t there, most vendors just wash out on their own rather than getting cut. He also warns against leading with plans for wide retail distribution or using a co-packer; most markets have rules against reselling co-manufactured product and want to see brands making their own goods.
Scaling From One Market to Twenty
Running a single market is simple—one founder, maybe one production assistant, everything done by hand. The jump that actually breaks that simplicity, according to Elliot, isn’t going from one market to two. It’s going from two to three, when overlapping start times force real logistics: driver routes, load lists, and staff who need to be trained rather than just directed.
His fix at that stage was building repeatable systems—modular, clearly labeled setups (box one for this market, box two for that one) so gear can be swapped and staffed without him personally managing every detail.
Past that point, adding more markets is largely “more of the same” system, scaled up. Obour Foods now runs on roughly 10–15 hours of his time a week, not because the business shrank, but because the systems do the work.
Treat Every Booth Like a Tiny Store
Elliot audits every setup against five questions before he considers it market-ready:
- Sightline — can shoppers find you from both directions?
- Display — does the product look full, cold, clean, and abundant?
- Flow — can staff sample, sell, restock, and take payment without colliding?
- Reset — can the next employee reproduce the same booth from scratch?
- Close — can you reconcile cash, inventory, waste, and notes at the end of the day?
Hiring and Training Booth Staff
Getting a hired rep to sell the way a founder would is one of the most common pain points brands run into—not just at farmers markets, but in retail demos generally. Elliot’s approach has a few layers:
- Hire people who already love the product. A rep who’s already a fan brings enthusiasm that’s hard to train into someone.
- Build simple systems, not personalities. Sales sheets, an SOP explaining what the product is and why it’s good, and a clean, repeatable sampling setup do most of the selling before a rep says a word.
- Set expectations early and be consistent, especially around punctuality—a market only runs a few hours, so a late start is lost revenue that can’t be recovered that day.
- Pick a product that sells itself. Free samples plus simple signage (his reads: “Free Hummus Samples,” nothing more) do a lot of the conversion on their own.
On the floor, he trains staff on a five-step script — greet, offer, ask, recommend, close:
- Greet — make eye contact.
- Offer — sample proactively.
- Ask — learn one preference.
- Recommend — narrow the choice.
- Close — state the offer.
A great booth with passive staff is still a passive booth. Elliot trains the behaviors, coaches with evidence, and rewards the whole job—sales matter, but so do setup accuracy, food safety, inventory, cash, notes, and customer experience.
For sourcing candidates, Elliot leans on Craigslist Gigs and straightforward job posts that state pay, hours, and what’s expected up front.
Obour Foods pays around $20/hour, plus a built-in perk that doubles as a market-wide barter economy: staff take home free product each shift and can trade it with neighboring vendors for produce, bread, or whatever else is on offer that week.
His broader hiring philosophy: “Average people with great systems beat amazing people with average systems, every time.”
Building Loyalty Without a Formal Loyalty Program
Obour Foods sells in reusable glass jars, and Elliot turns that packaging into a built-in retention system: bring a jar back to any location—shop or market—and get a dollar credit toward the next purchase. Between 30–40% of what goes out one week comes back (and gets repurchased) the next. No punch cards, no app—the jar itself is the loyalty program.
For digital follow-up, he relies on QR codes at the table (rather than paper mailing lists) and NFC taps that prompt a Google review, with each market location set up as its own separate Google Business listing.
Measure Contribution, Not Just Saturday Sales
Total sales is the vanity number. Elliot tracks net contribution instead—sales, minus COGS, labor, fees, travel, and waste—alongside a handful of supporting metrics:
- Sales per hour — productivity
- Average order — basket size
- Units per transaction — offer strength
- Samples to sales — conversion
- Waste and returns — execution
- Repeat signals — retention
The comparisons only mean something when they’re apples to apples: same market, hours, weather, season, staffing, and events.
Beyond Market Day: Turn Proof Into Placement
The best markets create growth that outlasts the market itself. Elliot uses the booth as a live testing ground for three things:
- Proof — learn what actually moves.
- Pitch — turn that data into a tested story.
- Placement — use the story to build new channels, from cafés and taprooms to retail.
When to Open a Brick-and-Mortar
Elliot’s shop inside San Francisco’s Ferry Building came after years of getting turned down for a table there. Rather than keep asking, he pitched opening a full storefront instead—already having the production, distribution, and sales experience to support it.
Seven months after reaching out, the shop opened. It became the piece that turned the business from “a farmers market operation” into a company with a polished, every-day storefront presence.
Why Farmers Markets Work Alongside–Not Instead of–Wholesale
Elliot’s clearest piece of strategic advice: don’t build a business that’s entirely dependent on farmers markets.
Early on, 90% of his revenue came from markets, and a single rained-out weekend could wipe out a third or more of it. Today markets make up roughly 35–40% of Obour Foods’ business, balanced by around 80–90 wholesale accounts—a mix he considers far more sustainable.
What markets do offer that wholesale can’t: same-day revenue and immediate, unfiltered customer feedback. Selling well at farmers markets for long enough tends to build the track record that makes retail buyers come looking, rather than the other way around.
This recap is based on a Startup CPG webinar conversation between Daniel Scharff and Elliot Sharifi, Founder of Obour Foods. Connect with Elliot on LinkedIn and follow Obour Foods on Instagram. Looking for booth materials like tents or branded tablecloths for your brand? Reach out to Brandon at Foundry BSG and mention Daniel’s name.
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