Jordan Boldt: Vancouver Farmers Market Always Fresh, Always Local.

Jordan Boldt of the Vancouver Farmers Market is our guest for this episode.  Jordan has been the Executive Director for the market since 2010.

The Vancouver Farmers Market is a non-profit organization with the focus of being a business incubator,  providing an open safe community space, and serving the at-need population in the Vancouver Washington area.  The market opened for business in 1990.  The market can have upwards of 120 spaces during the peak market season.

Jordan shares how a typical market day unfolds. Starting with market staff showing up at 5:30 am on Saturday to begin the process of setting up the area for the vendors to arrive. Vendors begin showing up and some of the booths can take 3 to 4 hours to setup.  The market opens up to the public at 9am and closes at 3pm.  The market has security to keep an eye on the market during Saturday evening so that the vendors do not have to tear down and can reduce their setup time on Sunday.  After the market closes on Sunday the team cleans up, sweeps etc. and is done around 7pm.  Staff can put in up to 20 to 24 hours in a weekend!

We talk about a wide ranging topics related to how a farmers market is run and this episode is full of information and was quite enlightening  to me.  We talk about the vendors and what trends Jordan is seeing in the market.

Covid has changed the market and we discuss how the market has adapted and found creative ways to serve their community.

If you are a fan of farmers markets you will find this episode to be full of interesting information. Jordan was a great guest and was very generous with this knowledge and time.

Jordan Boldt Vancouver Farmers Market Episode Transcript

You know, I just wish Seattle had a a basketball team we could but we won’t we won’t we’re talking farmers markets, not my broken heart. Welcome to the Exploring Washington State podcast. Here’s your host, Scott Cowan. Alright. Welcome back to this episode of the Exploring Washington State podcast where my guest today is Jordan Bolt. Jordan, your official title is

Jordan Boldt [00:00:41]:

Technically, I’m the executive director at the Vancouver Farmers Market in Vancouver, Washington.

Scott Cowan [00:00:45]:

Awesome. So I could joke. Is your dog’s with you? But what what what does that mean? What what what is your day to day duty? How’s that?

Jordan Boldt [00:00:55]:

Boy, I wish there was a way to really put that in a nice, neat box. I mean, ultimately, I fill the role of an executive director at any nonprofit. So I’m the chief executive of our organization. So I work under, you know, a volunteer board of directors. That’s a mix of members of our organization as well as community members at large. And my job is, you know, largely to manage the data operations of an organization like ours, finance and management and staff and those different details as well as ensure that we’re pursuing our strategic initiatives and doing all those things that nonprofits do.

Scott Cowan [00:01:29]:

K.

Jordan Boldt [00:01:30]:

So, obviously, that’s what I do. Practically speaking, we work at a farmer’s market that requires has a totally, you know, physical and sort of ongoing, like, workload that is under resourced and over needed. And so that means that I do all of those jobs, and I also take out the trash. And I fix our work truck and change the oil and, you know, deal with that when it’s needed. I fixed a window in our office, put new glass in a window in our office on Monday. Yeah, all these different things. So I sort of other duties as assigned is a big part of my job.

Scott Cowan [00:02:00]:

So when you applied for the job, did they ask you if you knew how to change a tire?

Jordan Boldt [00:02:03]:

I mean, was that was that was that part of

Scott Cowan [00:02:04]:

came up, but I’ll tell you what.

Jordan Boldt [00:02:06]:

Like, the most important aspects of being a market manager traditionally, like, you can’t don’t show up on a job application.

Scott Cowan [00:02:11]:

Okay. Yeah. So how long have you been doing this job?

Jordan Boldt [00:02:14]:

Been there since 02/2010.

Scott Cowan [00:02:16]:

Okay. And how long has Vancouver’s Farmer Market?

Jordan Boldt [00:02:19]:

You actually opened our market in 1990. So it’s a pretty long running market.

Scott Cowan [00:02:24]:

Yeah. So before we hit record, we’re we’re talking about this. And so I I I’d I’d love to well, I’d like to hear it in your words first. Describe for our audience what you think the Vancouver’s Farmers Market is all about. Yeah. It’s a it’s a fun question. And

Jordan Boldt [00:02:46]:

you and no matter you know, depending on who you ask, you get really answers about places like this. But in my in my sense, the market fulfills probably three big key roles in our community that I think are really important, in no particular order. Right? Like, we are a business incubator, so we work with over 200 small businesses. A lot of them are food and farm. We also have an artisan contingent, so local makers, that kind of stuff. And we are focused on their success. We’re giving them access to customers, supporting their business, giving them a low cost way to start their business. And so we really love entrepreneurs.

Jordan Boldt [00:03:19]:

We love start ups. We love people that are sort of pursuing their passions and dreams is and when especially when they align with sort of what we’re working on. We’re also really focused on providing a place for our community to gather, supporting sort of the placemaking aspect of that, creating an open, safe community space, that encourages not just like a healthy community, but healthy eating and and supporting of local businesses. And so we see a lot of value in that. And then more and more, our work is focused on serving, I wanna say at, you know, sort of at need populations or whatever. But we work a lot with folks who are on food assistance or who are maybe struggling with access to healthy food, working a lot with those populations, working a lot specifically, like, maybe non native English speaking populations who need access to that. And then we also do a lot of advocacy work for, like, farmers and small businesses locally. So, yeah.

Jordan Boldt [00:04:12]:

So there’s a lot of lot of legs to the stool that is the farmers market.

Scott Cowan [00:04:15]:

So it’s not just a bunch of stuff for us to go wander through on a Saturday. There’s a lot of stuff going on here.

Jordan Boldt [00:04:20]:

That’s like yeah. That’s like the physical manifestation of the market. And in order to make that happen and be successful long term, you have, like, an infrastructure behind it that supports

Scott Cowan [00:04:27]:

it. So the markets are on Saturdays. And Yeah. I’ve wandered through one time, I wandered through I was in Vancouver, and I wandered through the farmer’s market, unintentionally. I mean, I was there to go look at a coffee shop. And I just remember it being, like, it was a pretty good sized farmer’s market in my opinion. And your website references, you know, a large number of vendors in prerecording you, you know, but that’s not as many stalls as you have on any given day.

Jordan Boldt [00:05:01]:

He has kind of a misnomer, right, in the in the farmer’s market world. So we’re we’re a membership based organization like you would construct a business association. So those are our members. You know, we’re gonna have it’s it’s changed a little bit with COVID, but we we we sort of are in the low two hundreds. Usually, our I think our website does say two fifty right now. It’s probably dropped off a little bit. But Mhmm. 200 to 225, two hundred and 30, small businesses make up our membership every year.

Jordan Boldt [00:05:24]:

And that’s a combination of these businesses. And, they’re all they’re they’re the folks that are attending our markets. And on any given day, we have you know, this is we’re obviously speaking during, the coronavirus pandemic. And so we have all these lots and lots of regulation around how many spaces you can have and how much you have to space them apart. So we obviously had to take up some real estate to do that. But Mhmm.

Scott Cowan [00:05:46]:

We have about

Jordan Boldt [00:05:46]:

a 20 spaces currently in the market, and we will Okay.

Scott Cowan [00:05:50]:

We’ll average you

Jordan Boldt [00:05:51]:

know, we might have, like, we might at the end of the year, like, the end of last year, we averaged, like, I think, like, a hundred and three spaces a day over the course of the year.

Scott Cowan [00:05:57]:

Okay.

Jordan Boldt [00:05:58]:

Each season, you know, you’re midsummer, you’re gonna see that number full. Outside of the pandemic under normal circumstances, right, if we ever see those again, we would see in the area of, like, we have about a 60 spaces available. That’s a lot. Yeah. On any given day. And so and, obviously, you know, we have, like, that 200 plus vendors, but a lot of them, you know, like raspberry farmers are coming four to six weeks a year. Some people only come once a month, that kind of thing with their schedules. So we have a lot of turnover.

Jordan Boldt [00:06:24]:

Okay.

Scott Cowan [00:06:25]:

A lot

Jordan Boldt [00:06:25]:

of variance.

Scott Cowan [00:06:26]:

Yeah. So just this question just popped into my head. That’s beeping you hears the bus backing over you now as I back you know, just kidding. Saturday morning.

Jordan Boldt [00:06:38]:

Yeah.

Scott Cowan [00:06:40]:

What time does the what time does things get started? And, you know, the market’s at 9AM. Right? But

Jordan Boldt [00:06:47]:

Our market opens at nine on Saturdays and ten on Sundays. Yeah.

Scott Cowan [00:06:50]:

So 9AM, no one just showed up at 08:59 and got started. So how early is it? Walk me through the day, if you will.

Jordan Boldt [00:06:59]:

It’s a long day. You know, I, it really depends on the vendor. Some of them some of us based off of their personality. Some people some people we, you know, we close our streets at 08:30, you know, to get get cards off the street. But because customers will show up early. But we definitely have people who are rolling at 08:25. But, you know, it’s you know, our scaffolds show up usually between five and 05:30 on that morning to start opening the market. And there’s already gonna be a half dozen of vendors or so already at the market.

Jordan Boldt [00:07:26]:

We they’ve they know their spaces. They’re all preassigned. We have an interactive map so they know where to go, and they’re all basically marked on the street. Some of our especially, like, food vendors or some of our more serious, like, large farm produce vendors, they their displays will take them three, four hours to create. And so as a result of that, to sort of set up the tables to arrange their produce or if they’re like a a restaurant, like a hot food vendor, they have to get their equipment out and, get everything ready to go and start prepping things so that at 09:00 or probably a little bit early. Right? Like, they’re, like, our hot food vendors will all cook they’ll serve breakfast to other vendors. So all the vendors are coming around at eight, eight thirty to get breakfast from them and make a little money early on. So they they gotta get going early and you know, it hits it hit we don’t do a lot of markets will do this, like, opening bell.

Jordan Boldt [00:08:10]:

They have these very strict rules. Like, you can’t sell before, you know, you can’t sell after. We don’t necessarily have that rule. I’m a proponent of these businesses making money whenever and however they can as long as they do so responsibly. And so we don’t want big lines down the street early in the day or whatever. So they’ve sort of learned how to just open their businesses or a little early if they can and get a full sales day in.

Scott Cowan [00:08:31]:

So your staff’s shown up, say, we’ll just arbitrarily say 05:30.

Jordan Boldt [00:08:34]:

Yeah.

Scott Cowan [00:08:35]:

And it’s over at two. Right? Supposedly.

Jordan Boldt [00:08:37]:

Three 03:00.

Scott Cowan [00:08:38]:

Three o’clock.

Jordan Boldt [00:08:38]:

It’s over at three.

Scott Cowan [00:08:39]:

So how long does it take So on Saturday, some of your vendors are leaving their stuff overnight. Right? Kind of some of that in a couple of

Jordan Boldt [00:08:46]:

We have security guards that’s that staff overnight.

Scott Cowan [00:08:48]:

Okay.

Jordan Boldt [00:08:49]:

And, so they don’t so they don’t have to tear their stuff down. And, we have a new only crop of vendors who will show up on Sunday who only do one day. Okay. Saturdays are pretty popular market as you know for farmers mark a popular day, excuse me, for farmers markets. So Portland has I mean, Portland Metro Area, which we’re part of has, I don’t know, 45 markets or 40 markets happening and probably 25 or 30 of those are happening on a Saturday.

Scott Cowan [00:09:10]:

Is there that many?

Jordan Boldt [00:09:11]:

Quite a few. Yeah. A lot of them small. There’s some really good large ones in the area. And then, what’ll happen is they’re all but they’re a lot they’re all only one day. And so what’ll happen is a lot of those vendors who are maybe at a Saturday market in Portland or something will jump to us on a Sunday to get a second sales day in. So, anyways, they’ll show up on a Sunday. Sundays are much more chill because most people are already set up.

Jordan Boldt [00:09:29]:

They got their tents up. They just have to come and put their products back in their biz. Okay. So we start, you know, we start that day around six or seven. Okay. With vendors, you know, just one or two managers on-site, not a whole team. Because it’s quite a bit of work to shut streets down and stuff, and we keep them shut down all weekend. And then we’re here till we close at three again on a, on a Sunday.

Jordan Boldt [00:09:48]:

And then depending on the day, depending on how many customers we had and how much trash is left over and different things like that, we are there to sort of close it down and we sweep our you know, we’re on city streets and we are big proponents of leaving the place in Nashville. We found it. So we do lots of litter runs around the park and apartment buildings nearby and empty people’s trash cans and sweep the streets and try to leave sort of put the market to bed, and we’re usually out of there by six or seven on a Sunday night if we’re lucky.

Scott Cowan [00:10:12]:

So it’s an intense two days.

Jordan Boldt [00:10:16]:

Yeah. I mean, when I am actually as we are speaking, I’m just I’m just in the middle of prepping some budget stuff for a finance committee meeting for our board later tonight. And Uh-huh. You know, when you look at staff hours, it’s you know, our staff, if they work all weekend, will put in in the area of twenty to twenty four hours over the course of two days, just per person.

Scott Cowan [00:10:35]:

Okay. So

Jordan Boldt [00:10:36]:

I have to work because just those two days. Right.

Scott Cowan [00:10:39]:

So all these questions are, you know, like you said Yeah. With due to the pandemic, it’s kind of yeah. Sure. So what do you consider a normal day of traffic? How many people I mean, I know you you can’t, like, get an exact headcount, but, Yeah. I’m sure you guys have pretty good metrics.

Jordan Boldt [00:11:00]:

So We we have a couple methods we do. We we there’s a couple different ways. There’s all these there’s obviously, like, all kinds of, there’s, like, data science around how you do crowd counting and tracking this kind of stuff. There’s people that this is what they study. There’s a couple different methods you can use. The trick is, obviously, when you’re doing data tracking is just to be consistent in your methodology.

Scott Cowan [00:11:20]:

And so

Jordan Boldt [00:11:21]:

in this case, we use a system where we, we’ve done some customer surveys, and we need to do some more to kinda see how the pandemic has changed shopper behavior because this will change our methodology. But in general, in the customer surveys we’ve done, the average customer spends approximately thirty minutes at the market.

Scott Cowan [00:11:36]:

Okay.

Jordan Boldt [00:11:37]:

It’s sort of the obviously, some people here all day. Some people here a few minutes, but we’re sort of landing, like, the thirty ish minute range, which is a nice number. So that means that every thirty minutes, we walk the whole market and we count every person. We have, like, a track we follow, and we count all the people with, like, a hand clicker in the market.

Scott Cowan [00:11:52]:

Okay.

Jordan Boldt [00:11:53]:

And then we use those numbers to extrapolate out what our day would be like. And we do that every 30 minutes throughout the day, and we find trends and averages, and then we sort of look at our totals. Pre pandemic, we were in the range of between, I don’t know, seven to 8,000. Sometimes our our highest day was, like, 17,000. Wow. Mother’s Day weekend or something would be really crazy. That’s per day. We had over 600,000 customers a year coming through our market, pre pandemic.

Scott Cowan [00:12:22]:

K.

Jordan Boldt [00:12:23]:

This year between our three we have three markets. So we have two we have two days downtown, and we have one in a midweek market in another part of our city. So our total of our total customer counts at all those markets combined in 2021 was nearly 220,000. So about a third of where it was pre pandemic. Interestingly, it’s still pretty solid. Yeah. Interestingly enough, vendor sales do not show a similar reduction, which shows which tells us that the number of customers in your market is not a direct correlation to vendor success, which is a great which is great for us to understand because that’s a a metric that everyone wants to talk about, and it’s an important metric, how many people come to your market. But when we’re in the business of driving vendor sales and supporting local, you know, businesses, we’re really interested in, like, growing our sales and making them successful financially.

Jordan Boldt [00:13:14]:

And it’s great to know that we don’t have to necessarily drive more people to our market as much as important to drive shoppers to your market.

Scott Cowan [00:13:21]:

So I I’m I’m guessing. I mean, this is just, you know, those people that were attending in 2021 were attending to to buy, not because they were I’m I’m gonna guess, masks were required and, you know, I mean, all all of these things. Right? So yeah. Oh, that’s that’s interesting. So you were off numbers were off, but sales were relatively stable. That’s that’s

Jordan Boldt [00:13:43]:

that’s down. I mean, up for some vendors, down for others. The pandemic has done interesting things, with people buying habits, of course. Yes. It’s a great time to be a be a protein vendor, like a meat vendor. Dude, you can’t sell enough meat right now.

Scott Cowan [00:13:56]:

Well, yeah, you could sell all that you have. Exactly. Yeah.

Jordan Boldt [00:14:00]:

And so yeah. You know, that’s that’s been some interesting things to watch buyer. Just sort of watch shopper behavior change a little bit. But, yeah. I mean, definitely, some people are experiencing much lower years. You know, for our market, 02/2019 was a banner year for everyone. Mhmm. It was our highest attendance.

Jordan Boldt [00:14:16]:

It was our highest vendor attendance. It was the highest customer attendance. It was our best year financially as an organization, and it was many vendors in our years. And so coming off of that, it’s, like, hard to compare. The data over the last couple of years is so fragmented. But, you know, when I just you know, at the end of the day, like, we don’t so we don’t track sales data, which is something I wish we could do more of at our market, but we definitely have vendors who share their sales data with us. And it’s really, really helpful

Scott Cowan [00:14:42]:

Mhmm.

Jordan Boldt [00:14:43]:

To our management to understand how we can better serve and help our vendors be successful. K. But but a sort of real, like, real, unofficial metric is we just track vendor retention. And so we assume that if a vendor’s continuing to come back for thirty or forty days a year, they’re not losing money.

Scott Cowan [00:15:05]:

That’s a pretty safe assumption.

Jordan Boldt [00:15:07]:

Yeah. To a point. Right? And so Right. Obviously, there’s gonna be up days and down days, but

Scott Cowan [00:15:11]:

at the end of the

Jordan Boldt [00:15:12]:

day, they continue to the market is worth their time. There’s lots of avenues to be selling. There’s lots of sales channels right now. You know, if they’re still at the market, which is in many ways a really hard way to make a living, as a food business because of all the setup and the tear down and all the things that have to happen, it’s clearly worth their time. And so we’re encouraged by that.

Scott Cowan [00:15:34]:

How many people does it take to put on let’s just say the the weekend, the Saturday, Sunday market. How many, You mentioned staff and hours. How many people is work are working during that?

Jordan Boldt [00:15:47]:

Twelve twelve staff. Some of which are full time, and we have many who just are seasonal, like, weekend work. So we have some maintenance folks who just do trash and sort of pick up stuff around the market. We have a couple parking lots that we lease, that we will just to secure parking for customers on the weekend that we can control. And, so we have, like, high school kids we’ll hire that’ll sort of work our parking lots and be parking lot attendants, that kind of stuff. But it’s about 12 people in probably between six to eight volunteers in addition to that every weekend that are filling shifts.

Scott Cowan [00:16:18]:

Okay.

Jordan Boldt [00:16:19]:

Yeah. It’s it’ll reduce a little bit with COVID, as COVID regulations ease. There was a point where we had to rope off our entire market, which is, like, over a hundred thousand square feet of space, and we had to rope it off and, or not hundred thousand. Sorry. About 15,000 square feet of space, but still a big That’s

Scott Cowan [00:16:37]:

a big space. Lot of space. Yeah.

Jordan Boldt [00:16:38]:

And a half city blocks. And, we had to rope it all off and control entrances and exits to maintain occupancy in the market and have to count all the customers. So it was really arduous to be policing that and having staff running around because people were ripping down ropes and ducking under things. Oh, Jesus. There’s just a lot of that. As some of those regulations are easing, we’re able to sort of run the market a little more efficiently.

Scott Cowan [00:17:01]:

K. Yeah. What you said Mother’s Day weekend. That makes a lot of sense.

Jordan Boldt [00:17:08]:

Famous famous Farmers Market Day weekend. Yeah.

Scott Cowan [00:17:10]:

That makes a lot of sense.

Jordan Boldt [00:17:11]:

You’re a flower vendor. That’s how you’re paying for your year right now.

Scott Cowan [00:17:13]:

The whole year is right there in that weekend. Yeah. A lot

Jordan Boldt [00:17:15]:

of them will do a month’s worth of revenue in a day. Wow. Yeah. It’s pretty crazy.

Scott Cowan [00:17:20]:

So earlier on in yep. I jokingly say Portland’s dead to me because it’s not in Washington state, but I’ll be you know, that’s just tongue in cheek. But Vancouver’s just across the river, so, you know, you are just like your Bellevue to Seattle. I mean, you’re just you can’t talk about Vancouver and not talk about Portland. Right. But you said there’s approximately 45 markets in the Portland Metro Area, approximately.

Jordan Boldt [00:17:43]:

Yeah. That’s what I’ve that’s the number I’ve I’ve most recent number I’ve seen.

Scott Cowan [00:17:46]:

Yeah. What what do you mean, like, the metro area? What is that in your opinion, what does that entail?

Jordan Boldt [00:17:51]:

It’s pretty big, but for those familiar with the area, it’s gonna be, like, obviously, Portland, Vancouver, Beaverton, Hillsborough, Oregon City, Gresham. K. Kind of that area. It’s, I don’t even know what the population of that is. It’s somewhere in the, I wanna say, 2 and a half million range or

Scott Cowan [00:18:07]:

something. I wouldn’t I don’t know, but I wouldn’t say you were wrong. Let’s put that one. It seems reasonable. What other markets are there on the Washington side of the of the Columbia? What Yeah. Is that part of the metro area that we’re including too? Totally.

Jordan Boldt [00:18:18]:

Yeah. So we consider ourselves in that area. We’re we’re definitely considered part of the Portland Metro Area even though we’re in Washington here. And, like I say, I’m looking out my office window at Downtown Portland right now. So that’s how close it is. Right? So Yes. Exactly. Yeah.

Jordan Boldt [00:18:32]:

It’s, Yeah. So in in Clark County, we have a number of small markets, smaller markets that are have been around for a long time. They’re doing really well. Camas Farmers Market. Camas is an up and coming city on the East Side of Clark County. It’s a really, cool area, and they have a great little market. Salmon Creek Farmers Market runs a they both run mid week markets. Okay.

Jordan Boldt [00:18:49]:

Salmon Creek is a neighborhood that’s just North of Vancouver. And so it’s sort of a sort of the county, like, the unincorporated area, but it’s just it’s a it’s a pretty populated area just north of us. Okay.

Scott Cowan [00:18:59]:

And

Jordan Boldt [00:18:59]:

then, like, there’s a town called Battle Ground and the town called Ridgefield. They both have had small markets off and on, that Ridgefield sort of happens with some frequency, and then our markets. So there’s about five or so markets happening on this side of the River

Scott Cowan [00:19:13]:

K. That I can think of off top of my head.

Jordan Boldt [00:19:15]:

Okay. Yeah.

Scott Cowan [00:19:18]:

Yeah. It’s just it’s when you said 45, that was like, wow. That’s that’s awesome.

Jordan Boldt [00:19:22]:

Portland, I think you know, this is not I I just this is sort of a spitball in here, but I think Sure. I’ll say, like, the Portland Farmers Market System that is, like, the formal organization, Portland Farmers Market. Their Their most famous market is PSU downtown. It’s it’s just a phenomenal large, like, nationally known market. It is but they also run, I think, wanna say five or six other neighborhood markets during the week, throughout the year. And so they’re they’re gonna be a five to seven, you know, market organization.

Scott Cowan [00:19:49]:

Okay.

Jordan Boldt [00:19:49]:

Beaverton market has runs a few markets in Beaverton, you know. And then there’s a number of neighborhood markets that are sort of one offs that have popped up around town.

Scott Cowan [00:19:58]:

Okay. Yeah. Is this just just all this this conversation just sparks all sorts of questions? Like, is I wanna phrase this so that it’s not awkward. Well, I’ll phrase it awkwardly, and then you you help me out. Is is the city of Vancouver good to work with? And I mean that in the sense of because you’re gonna be blocking off streets and things like that.

Jordan Boldt [00:20:20]:

Yeah.

Scott Cowan [00:20:21]:

How how was that received when you guys you know? Does that make sense?

Jordan Boldt [00:20:25]:

Yeah. I know. Totally. Absolutely. You know, it’s a it yeah. I mean, the city is great to work with. The city is is we’re still a relatively small town. Right? It’s like we’re still we still sort of function like a small city even though we’re rapidly growing.

Jordan Boldt [00:20:39]:

I don’t know if we’re the fastest growing city in the in the state, but we’re up there.

Scott Cowan [00:20:42]:

You’re up there.

Jordan Boldt [00:20:44]:

And, it’s it’s just especially downtown. Downtown is a really you know, Downtown Vancouver is weird and that it is, geographically, it’s located at sort of a weird spot in our city. So the city of Vancouver is is, is sort of narrow and wide. I’m sorry. Like, short and wide. And so it’s not it’s like, I don’t wanna say it’s, like, seven miles tall or something if you look at it on the map, but it’s, like, 15 miles wide. And so what’s interesting is we and we sort of go along. We sort of follow the Columbia River.

Jordan Boldt [00:21:12]:

Right? Mhmm. Vancouver is at the far west end of our city limits, sort of the Southwest corner of Southwest Washington.

Scott Cowan [00:21:21]:

Okay.

Jordan Boldt [00:21:22]:

What happens is the majority of the city is north and east of us, significantly to the east of us. And so even though it’s our, quote, unquote, city center, it’s not the center of our of our formal city. So, like, it’s but it’s been interesting. Right? So, like, the centers of of of energy and how energy flows in an in and around our, quote, unquote, city limits has been a little different. And we are on the I 5 Corridor, downtown is. We have two major highways going through, 205 and I 5 from through our city in sort of different sides, and so kinda bisect our city in a couple different ways. But as a result of that, Downtown Vancouver for many, many years has not necessarily been a thriving place.

Scott Cowan [00:21:57]:

Okay. It’s

Jordan Boldt [00:21:57]:

been, you know, it’s gone through, like, a lot of small downtowns, gone through its urban issues, and continues to have some new emerging issues, with, like, houseless populations and some of that kind of stuff, vandalism, those kind of things. But, for a long time, Downtown Vancouver was predominantly, Monday through Friday city. So businesses and offices. There’s there’s the county seat. Right? So there’s the courthouse. There’s the sheriff’s office, the jail, like, all the law offices,

Scott Cowan [00:22:24]:

and the

Jordan Boldt [00:22:24]:

little businesses associated with that. City office the county has their headquarters downtown. This city has a headquarters downtown. So and the federal buildings downtown. So all the government offices and legal offices. Mondays and or I’m sorry. Sun Saturdays and Sundays, it was pretty dead down here

Scott Cowan [00:22:38]:

K.

Jordan Boldt [00:22:38]:

When I joined. And I joined in 02/2010 coming out of recession, pretty rough time for a city like ours. In the years since, it has really taken off. Our waterfront is is really been developed. A lot of private money is coming in. The restaurant food scene is really taking off. Our downtown association is really thriving. And through all of that, the market was but the market, especially early on, was coming out of the recession.

Jordan Boldt [00:23:02]:

We were, like, the only thing down down. It was really important. The market was actually this is this is probably a lot more information than you want, but this is before my time, but

Scott Cowan [00:23:11]:

we’re in

Jordan Boldt [00:23:11]:

a we’re we’re in a park called Ester Shore Park. It’s not where the market started. We started east of here a couple blocks.

Scott Cowan [00:23:16]:

We moved

Jordan Boldt [00:23:16]:

to Ester Shore Park in, I think, twenty twenty

Scott Cowan [00:23:19]:

k.

Jordan Boldt [00:23:19]:

’10 years after we founded. It was part of this big redevelopment. Ester Shore Park is actually a park I grew up in as a kid. It looks totally different now, but it was kind of a rough part of town. It was it was a park that has sort of been taken over by, sort of some undesirable elements in our community and lots of drug trafficking and stuff happening there or whatever. So they redeveloped it. They they really cleared a lot of, you know, a lot of the brush out. They put some play structures in.

Jordan Boldt [00:23:43]:

They put a big hardscape in, Berkeleyville, which is a really well known, like, sort of fast food chain here in Southwest Washington and Washington, Vancouver based thing. He the the the founder of that passed away, but he he had donated a good chunk of money to, to build, like, a square, like, a town square here. And so we built Proptia Square, and then we built the market. We put the market around it, and they built the street for the market. One of our streets, we put power and water in the street so vendors could have access to utilities, which is super rare and really, really special for a market like ours. Yeah. Everyone comes to our market. Other market managers come and they’re like, oh my gosh.

Jordan Boldt [00:24:16]:

This is amazing. You know?

Scott Cowan [00:24:17]:

Like, it’s Yeah. Power.

Jordan Boldt [00:24:19]:

It’s pretty great. Yeah. As a result of that and that was all part of, like, the police chief, I believe, and the mayor at the time who was the mayor was really forward thinking this guy named Royce Pollard, and it was, like, a really great way. And I think our police chief at the time sort of said this, like, a really great way to combat some of the crime that was happening here. He’s like, you don’t arrest away this problem. He’s like, but a great way to combat this is like moms in strollers because, you know, when you sort of shine a light on crime, it sort of shrivels in light. And so he was you know, they were like, let’s activate this park. Let’s get this place busy on the weekends when there’s art when there’s not business going downtown, hence the farmer’s market.

Jordan Boldt [00:24:55]:

And we kind of helped to reclaim this part of downtown and sort of plan their flag and and sort of the rest is history. K. Finish your talk to finish your con to sort of finish your question, though. What’s interesting, though, is we run this interesting situation as we come into 2020 where twenty twenty twenty one and on, we’re seeing significant growth taking place in our community, lots of private development, lots of money coming in, lots of residential, which is new, which brings us a little whole new set of issues and challenges. And so as our town gets denser, it’s harder to shut down streets. People are less inclined to one shoot strut down. They’re not sure how to drive around the market and all the challenges and the businesses that come down here and the trash and the people, all the things that just that come with a large scale gathering.

Scott Cowan [00:25:40]:

Right.

Jordan Boldt [00:25:41]:

And so it’s a constant conversation. And it’s I wouldn’t say it’s a constant tension, but it’s on everyone’s mind. It’s like, how do we manage that? The market’s pretty important to the city. It was really important during the last recession, as a business incubator and a activator, like a outside safe public space downtown.

Scott Cowan [00:25:58]:

Mhmm.

Jordan Boldt [00:25:59]:

It becomes it feels markets, I think, in general, feel less important during boom times, but they become vitally important during busts. And k.

Scott Cowan [00:26:08]:

We

Jordan Boldt [00:26:08]:

you know, we’re really we’re also markets, not just us. I think all markets are we’re sort of somewhat countercyclical in our success. And so while when economies are struggling, markets can often be thriving. We see, you know, we saw their last recession. We saw a real rise in sort of the buy local movement nationally. We saw real was people losing jobs. We see a natural growth in entrepreneurship. We see a natural growth in people sort of being forced out of maybe things they didn’t positions they don’t wanna be in and getting to pursue their dreams.

Jordan Boldt [00:26:43]:

We have a number of vendors in our market who are making full time livings here, who lost their jobs in their last recession and took a flyer on a dream and have landed here and have made this really successful. So markets are one of the things that is really important to economic success during a downturn because we support sort of that segment of the population.

Scott Cowan [00:27:03]:

Excellent. Excellent answer.

Jordan Boldt [00:27:06]:

Kinda long winded, but I hope

Scott Cowan [00:27:07]:

No. No. See, this is this is Hope

Jordan Boldt [00:27:09]:

you got some interesting stuff there.

Scott Cowan [00:27:11]:

No. Absolutely. You’re you’re this is just great content.

Jordan Boldt [00:27:16]:

It’s good. And and like I say, it’s it’s a it’s a hard conversation to have with developers and city officials because that’s doesn’t always resonate with them, because it’s not a direct flashy, thing like a brand new skyscraper or or whatever. There’s this sort of slow constant to markets that’s not as sexy as sometimes they want to see during boom times. And Okay. That’s sort of our, like but that’s sort of we’re sort of the low like, the the slow and steady wins the race. Our consistency over the course of thirty plus years is what leads to this long term community health. Because it’s sort of our stance on it.

Scott Cowan [00:27:57]:

How do people go about okay. So walk me through. I wanna be a vendor.

Jordan Boldt [00:28:02]:

Yeah. We’re new to that.

Scott Cowan [00:28:04]:

I wanna sell my widget. Mhmm. Whatever whatever let’s I I love coffee, so I wanna sell coffee. Great. I wanna sell my my wood fired coffee roasted coffee. Great. How do I go about because I just can’t show up on Saturday and No. Sell my coffee.

Jordan Boldt [00:28:20]:

No. Not at all. Yeah. We have a process for that. We’re in the middle of this literally as we speak. We have we’ve largely broken our market our market into three categories. This is how we handle it. Other markets do this differently.

Jordan Boldt [00:28:33]:

I don’t actually know that I love our system, but it’s the system that’s been around for a long time, so we’re kinda working in it.

Scott Cowan [00:28:38]:

So what

Jordan Boldt [00:28:38]:

we do is we break our we break our mark into three categories. We have farmers, agriculture based vendors. Those would obviously be agriculture products, but also things like meat, fish, cheese, dairies, all that kind of stuff. Then we have what we call, like, food vendors. Those could be like a hot food, like someone who’s cooking, you know, falafel at the market or pizza or whatever they’re doing, like this, like, a small restaurant trying to get started or food truck. It also includes what you call, like, artisan food or packaged food. So hot sauces, bakeries, coffee

Scott Cowan [00:29:06]:

Okay.

Jordan Boldt [00:29:07]:

Things like that.

Scott Cowan [00:29:08]:

Okay. And then

Jordan Boldt [00:29:08]:

we have a third category for artisans. These are makers, woodworkers, potters, people like that who do sort of, like who are creators and makers in our community, and we’re working to sort of we’re unique. Most markets don’t work with them in the farmer’s market world, but we do. And so that’s sort of something that sets us apart.

Scott Cowan [00:29:22]:

We have

Jordan Boldt [00:29:22]:

three different categories of vendors, and we have three committees that are overseen by staff, board, and other members of our community who sort of volunteer on those three committees. And they’re sort of subject matter experts. So on our food committee, we have a staff member. We have some board members who are also food vendors and have experience in that industry. We also have, like, some local chefs on that. We have a guy from the local culinary school. A teacher from local culinary school. And they just sort of assess that.

Jordan Boldt [00:29:48]:

And so what happens is we’re right now just taking open applications, and so vendors can apply. We usually are applying December through Jan December and January. Applications are open for the coming year. We shut them off on February 1. And then you submit your application. You have an online form that you submit that through, and it’s called a company called Management Market. Most markets are working with them now in the area. So it’s just a a site that collates this information.

Jordan Boldt [00:30:11]:

They send out their application to us. And then what we do is we look through that. They we can sort of take a first look. And if you are qualified, meaning you are making your product, you’re you’re sourcing your product in a way that fits our requirements, you are, you know, you you’re the type of vendor that we want our market. We have a lot of resellers. We have a lot of people who are trying to get in with, like, hey. I import this product. I wanna resell it, or I have a friend who has a business and stuff.

Jordan Boldt [00:30:35]:

So we don’t we don’t work with

Scott Cowan [00:30:36]:

those folks. But So I can’t sell iPhone

Jordan Boldt [00:30:38]:

cases, though? We can sell iPhone cases here. Well, if you were a woodworker who’s Okay.

Scott Cowan [00:30:41]:

Making the

Jordan Boldt [00:30:42]:

product, that would work.

Scott Cowan [00:30:43]:

Okay.

Jordan Boldt [00:30:43]:

But you’d have to be you’d have to be manufacturing it. Right? So you have to be, like, making it yourself. Pretty strict about that. So you’re doing coffee. So we’re gonna look at your coffee business. We’re gonna be like, awesome. So, Scott, sources these beans from these people. Obviously, you’re not growing them locally.

Jordan Boldt [00:30:56]:

We get that. But you’re sourcing your green beans. You’re roasting them yourself. You’re packaging them yourself. He has his own label. He has all these different kinds of things. Yes. We wanna look at him.

Jordan Boldt [00:31:03]:

Our next step is we’ll have you submit some of your product for testing. In your case, we’d be like, we need some we need to see a couple pictures to demonstrate that you are actually roasting this. So some pictures of your process, so we actually see what you’re processing. And then Mhmm. Give us what you want us to you know, let’s look at your menu. And if you’re gonna say I’m selling cold brew and coffee beans, I’d be great. Give us a sample of your cold brew and give us a bag of coffee beans. And then we will brew them as a group, and we’ll we might bring in, like, a local coffee roaster that we work with or someone else who’s neutral, and we’ll assess your product.

Jordan Boldt [00:31:34]:

And we’ll we’ll sort of go around the room, and we’ll go, does this one just meet our qualifications? That’s the first thing. Like, is this a quality product? Is this done responsibly? Is this what we want represented? The answer is yes. Then we ask the next question, which is great. Do we have room for this person in our market? And then that’s the conversation we have. And So Yeah. Go ahead.

Scott Cowan [00:31:52]:

Couple questions come out of that

Jordan Boldt [00:31:53]:

for me.

Scott Cowan [00:31:55]:

So first off, I I you answered, like, when I joked about the iPhone cases. But so Yeah. We’re not bringing resellers in. They’re selling, you know, Portland Trailblazer T shirts.

Jordan Boldt [00:32:03]:

Exactly. No.

Scott Cowan [00:32:04]:

Okay. Because you’re not a Trailblazers fan, are you? No. Okay. Good.

Jordan Boldt [00:32:09]:

I’m not. I was asking you to go to their game tonight, but the tickets fell through. So Okay. I’m not a terrible shit. But, no, I’m not. Alright. Okay. Although Do you the baseball team, I will be a fan of the baseball team.

Scott Cowan [00:32:22]:

I can allow that.

Jordan Boldt [00:32:23]:

Yeah. I’m big baseball.

Scott Cowan [00:32:24]:

I I hope Portland gets a baseball team.

Jordan Boldt [00:32:26]:

I think it’d be great.

Scott Cowan [00:32:28]:

I I hope Portland I I’m a baseball

Jordan Boldt [00:32:31]:

Yeah.

Scott Cowan [00:32:32]:

No. I love baseball. And I you know, Tampa Bay is probably gonna be available. Yeah. Because they turned them down. They won’t let them play half the games in Montreal. So

Jordan Boldt [00:32:42]:

Yeah.

Scott Cowan [00:32:42]:

I I think, unfortunately, I think Tampa Bay might you might get the the Tampa Bay Rays.

Jordan Boldt [00:32:46]:

I mean, I think we’ll take what we can get. Right? And then you can start building that team there. You know, make it your own. I think it’d be great. Yeah. Me too. You know,

Scott Cowan [00:32:53]:

I just wish Seattle had a a basketball team again. But we want we want we’re talking farmers markets, not my broken heart. So is there, are there in the sense of guidelines, I mean, how many let let’s you know, how many coffee companies

Jordan Boldt [00:33:10]:

Can you have those kind of things? So this is where the science and the art of a farmer’s market sort of, Intersect? Yeah. This is your intersection here. So Okay. You know, I don’t believe this is Jordan’s perspective on this, and as executive director, I get to kind of, like, cast this vision a little bit for the organization. But, I inherently am a capitalist and don’t believe that that people should have necessarily exclusivity, to a specific product. So just because we have and we’re used to be that was a big part of farmer’s markets for a long time. Like, our board was all vendors, and so they’d be like, I’m the coffee vendor. So no one else can sell coffee here.

Scott Cowan [00:33:50]:

Gotcha.

Jordan Boldt [00:33:51]:

And, you know, that might be okay if your product is awesome and you can actually serve every customer widely and provide a really good representation and you’re always at the market. But what happens is that doesn’t happen. Right? So that that guy decides not to come to the market or he decides to sort of take every weekend off, every other weekend off and which is totally fine. You gotta have a life. You gotta you gotta run your business. So I’m not gonna tell you tell you how to run your business, but what that that means is that our shoppers don’t get to

Scott Cowan [00:34:16]:

In the second coffee.

Jordan Boldt [00:34:17]:

Except unless you’re there, you know, and, you know, to allow one vendor to control that for their our entire thing because that’s at that point, it affects the market because it’s a customer experience. And so we wanna make sure we have a well rounded good shopping experience. Also, vendors don’t like to hear this, but the very fact of the matter is having a little healthy competition in the market is good for everyone. It’s I’m not trying to make them compete hard with each other, but it it keeps you on your toes. And there are vendors who’ve been here for many, many years. They’re great. There’s also vendors who’ve been here for a long time and have kind of been sometimes will find themselves lulled into a bit of complacency. Mhmm.

Jordan Boldt [00:34:51]:

And it’s great to not to shake them up, and I’m not trying to hurt their business, but it’s great for people to always sort of be required to sort of think about ways to stay fresh and stay relevant to their customer base. And, honestly, it keeps customers coming back to have new stuff. If you see the same thing every time in the same place every weekend, the market becomes a little stale. And so for all those reasons, there it needs to be I’m a big fan of some gradual turnover over time as vendors retire. We move on. We have many vendors who’ve gone on. We have vendors who’ve been coffee vendors who’ve gone on to open their own coffee shops and open their own tea shops and open their own restaurants and whatever rice. And we’ve celebrate that.

Jordan Boldt [00:35:27]:

We call that graduating from the market. We’re like, great. You shouldn’t be here forever. This is a launchpad. Spread your wings and fly on to bigger and better things, and we’ll bring in your the next one of you, and we’ll get them the chance to do that in a couple years as well. And so, it’s a bit of a a philosophical discussion. But you also don’t want six coffee vendors. Right? So right now, we Right.

Jordan Boldt [00:35:46]:

We have we have two

Scott Cowan [00:35:48]:

k.

Jordan Boldt [00:35:48]:

At the market, and that’s a real seems to be a really good number. Oftentimes, what we’ll do so you’d be a perfect example. Let’s just we’ll continue to use your coffee example. You wanna show up and do coffee. We’re open Saturday, Sunday. And coffee vendors always are like, we wanna do both days all the time, which is great. But what we’ll just be is like, listen. We already got a guy here on Saturdays.

Jordan Boldt [00:36:08]:

How about how about you do Sundays? And that’s just the conversation we have. And you start doing Sundays. And you start filling on those off days, and we go from there. There’s some ways to sort of navigate that.

Scott Cowan [00:36:20]:

Well and I and I I love the fact that you said, you know, graduate from the market, and I’d I would like to come back to that in a little bit. Yeah. But so you have the application process, and and here’s where, you know, it’s not an exact science that you’re gonna have one coffee company for every 30 booths. Let’s just do, you know, arbitrarily. And I agree with you about the healthy competition because not now what I’m about to say is the polar opposite of a farmer’s market. But when you look at any major intersection in a city where you see a fast food place on every corner, the reason they’re there is because people know that they can go and get fast food there. They might want brand x today and brand y next week. So but that’s good.

Scott Cowan [00:37:05]:

So having having, in our example, a couple of coffee places, I think that is good.

Jordan Boldt [00:37:13]:

Yep. You know? And it’s also you know, we’ll use our coffee vendors right now as an example, not to speak. Not the ones any better than the other, but they’re different. You know, they actually do two different roasting techniques. Okay. Coffee nerds out there. And so there’s different styles of roasts.

Scott Cowan [00:37:28]:

Yes. There is. Source

Jordan Boldt [00:37:30]:

differently. And as a result of that, one of them is a much higher price point. It’s a more premium, like, single origin style coffee, and then others are more I wanna call it generic, but it’s a more a little more approachable, like, coffee you would have. And as a result as a result of that, he has turned his business because he has a better price point into serving, like, local offices who he’ll sell them two pound bags or three pound bags of coffee. He’ll do service at their he’ll bring coffee to their offices. He’s built a whole industry around that, which is great for him. The other people who are selling, you know, coffee at twice the price per pound, but it’s a more single origin like source coffee is serving a clientele that’s looking for that specific type of coffee. And the fact of the matter is those customers don’t necessarily cross paths.

Scott Cowan [00:38:13]:

No. They don’t. Fine. That’s Just just just like, you know, flower vendors that have different types of flowers and Exactly. You know, all that. So now I’m gonna ask some questions that, you know, just because I’m just curious. Okay? So these so putting you on the spot. Yeah.

Scott Cowan [00:38:30]:

Try not to put you on the spot, but put you on the spot. Give me an example of Jordan’s vendors that you had you admire at the market. Like, in I’m not asking for specific names, like Bill Bill’s beans, but who who who in that market yeah. Dude. Like, you don’t buy every you you you don’t shop all 20 booths. Right? So Not necessarily. Yeah. Yeah.

Scott Cowan [00:38:58]:

If you were going to the market and let’s say for sake of conversation, because depending on when somebody listens to this, the market actually might be firing on every Saturday. Right now, it’s not. But if you were to go in the market on Saturday, what would you be looking at?

Jordan Boldt [00:39:10]:

Yeah. So I do make I do try I do try to make an effort to buy something from a lot of our vendors.

Scott Cowan [00:39:17]:

But

Jordan Boldt [00:39:17]:

the fact of the matter is there’s a lot of things that are being sold that are not marketed toward or targeted towards me.

Scott Cowan [00:39:22]:

Right. But, you

Jordan Boldt [00:39:24]:

know, so there’s, like, lots of, like, bath and body products and, you know, artisan stuff that I’m not necessarily into. Mhmm. But I definitely have probably bought and consumed everything that our food vendors sell. I’m a big food, and I’m a big and I’m really into cooking. And so Okay. You know, I’m a big fan of those things. I’m also I also really find myself supporting for through I don’t think this is I mean, it’s not necessarily overtly a decision of mine. I think it’s this is the interesting thing about business.

Jordan Boldt [00:39:52]:

I really find myself supporting the vendors that have really, like, are doing a good job. Not to say all vendors don’t do a good job, but there’s just vendors who, like, work a little who have really figured out, like, how to market it. It’s just, like, how to market their product, how to how to sell that product. And then, you know, for my case, I have personal relationships. I’ve been here, you know, for twelve years now. So I have personal relationships with a lot of these farmers. I’ve been there since they started. You know, we have a we have a a new, not new.

Jordan Boldt [00:40:19]:

They’ve been marketed just a few years though. Beef fender, I mentioned. And the it’s a husband and wife team. He actually I’ve actually it’s funny. I actually knew his family kind of of their family growing up where I grew up in a small town east of here. But they were dairy family kind of getting out of the dairy business, And he was a he had a full time job, his professional job. His wife has a full time professional job, but his passion was raising animals and being a responsible farmer. And, so he started doing it part time as a result of the market, coming every day, building a clientele over time, being great at customer service, and having a great product.

Jordan Boldt [00:40:58]:

He he had a really good job. He was a he was a, you know, industrial job, traveled the country, and he quit his job, quit his full time job, and he’s a full time farmer now. And it’s really fun to watch that happen. And so I really have this, like, vested interest in this guy. Right? So I’m like, I’m gonna buy beef from this guy even though I don’t drink much beef because I wanna support the fact that this guy was able to quit his corporate job, his professional job, and, like, become a full time farmer and support his family that way. We have a number of people who’ve done that, and I just think that’s really great. We also have people who just this is something that I think people who shop in grocery stores are missing out on is you really get, like, some really niche or niche, like, specialist, like, people who are real experts in certain things, and it’s really fun to do that. So we’ll have, like, a cranberry vendor who, like, owns a cranberry bog and,

Scott Cowan [00:41:44]:

you know,

Jordan Boldt [00:41:44]:

that’s all he does. And you kinda get these great cranberries. We have one amazing family owned lamb farmer here, and they’re just really responsible, super hardworking family. I love to buy from them, some great farmers, and then we obviously have lots of fun. You know? Right now, everyone’s selling hot sauce. So lots of fun hot sauces and bakeries and that kind of stuff. So I mean, I spend so much money, Scott, at the farmer’s market. It’s just it’s just disgusting.

Jordan Boldt [00:42:09]:

But I will say and I can say this with confidence. Like, there’s definitely some things we don’t have in our market that I’d love to have that a lot of markets don’t have, like milk, or, like, good cheeses. It’s just just the industry. That’s not just our market. That’s just the industry in general. That’s a really hard industry right now. It has been for forever. Mhmm.

Jordan Boldt [00:42:28]:

Right. Both from a regulatory and financial perspective. And so we’re just not we’re seeing less and less than that markets, which is challenge. But, so you’ll find me going to the grocery store to get, like, a gallon of milk, and to maybe buy some nice cheese on occasion.

Scott Cowan [00:42:40]:

Right. You’d rather do it from the market?

Jordan Boldt [00:42:43]:

I’d rather totally rather do it from the market. That’s about it. So, like, the conversation we’ll have here at the market, which is funny, is we’ll be sitting there and be like, someone will be like, oh, I went to went to the grocery store last night. It was kinda weird because I hadn’t been there in two months. And, that’s just kind of that’s, like, the big perk. Like, the everyone whenever we hire people, like, what’s what’s the biggest perk of work? Like, what’s the best thing about working for a farmer’s market? And we’re like, you get a grocery shop while you’re at work. Like, you have to

Scott Cowan [00:43:07]:

go to you have to

Jordan Boldt [00:43:08]:

go to grocery store, so it’s great. And you eat I love that. Eat really, really well.

Scott Cowan [00:43:16]:

So many of the questions I wanna ask aren’t to, like like, have you single something out. But What? I’m gonna I’m gonna, paint a picture.

Jordan Boldt [00:43:26]:

Okay.

Scott Cowan [00:43:26]:

I’m gonna show up, Saturday morning, and you’re gonna you’re gonna spend some time with me, showing me around the market. And I forgot to grab something to eat. So first thing in the morning, what should I be trying at at the Vancouver’s Farmers’ Market? Is there is there something there that I should check out? Or was there something I mean, you know,

Jordan Boldt [00:43:47]:

you know? Yeah. I mean, well, there’s a couple options, but I usually run to one of our bakeries and grab, like, a nice healthy cinnamon roll or scone or something. Okay. My that and a cup of coffee is my, like, that’s my market breakfast that I can, like, roll around the market with and kind of navigate. We also have, like, we have a few folks who do, like, smoothies and that kind of stuff in the morning. You know, some juice vendors, that kind of stuff. They’re using local food, which is great. So you get that kind

Scott Cowan [00:44:12]:

of

Jordan Boldt [00:44:13]:

product there. But I don’t tend to go the healthy route as much as I should, and I like a nice cup of black coffee and, like, a scone. And I’m I’m I’m ready to run the market.

Scott Cowan [00:44:23]:

Alright. So now it’s fast fast forward. It’s lunchtime. What what should what should I be trying at the market? Mhmm.

Jordan Boldt [00:44:30]:

This is a really interesting discussion. So we have a lot of good hot food at the market. Especially in the last couple years, we’ve added, we have, like, a new vendor who’s Laotian, so it’s very it’s it’s slightly different, but definitely different than Vietnamese food. Okay. Thai food. So it’s like this now is the third category that you don’t see a lot of in Yeah. Unless you’re, like, maybe in Seattle or parts of Portland that have specific restaurants that you just seek out. But she’s, like, fan she has, like, her fan her, like, family’s recipes from, like, their village in, like, the, like, the mountains of Laos.

Jordan Boldt [00:45:02]:

And so really unique fun food, that is just amazing.

Scott Cowan [00:45:07]:

Okay.

Jordan Boldt [00:45:08]:

We have a new vendor who’s Egyptian, so she does all Egyptian stews and, like, all kinds of crazy stuff, that’s really, really fun. So there’s some fun ethnic, like, really, like, authentic foods that are coming from people that are, like, first generation, like, from those countries and are bringing their recipes here. We really love to see that. So we also have a great Taiwanese that in here at the market is Taiwanese street food, which is, again, totally different. So I really am like I’m like, there’s a really fun chance to sort of try some of the unique food at the market.

Scott Cowan [00:45:41]:

I can tell you I can tell you I mean, look at me. Yeah. I it’s obvious I don’t miss meals. Yeah. Right?

Jordan Boldt [00:45:46]:

That’s great.

Scott Cowan [00:45:47]:

But I have never eaten Low Asian, Egyptian, or Taiwanese. Oh, maybe. But but, you know, no. I would never have I’ve never tried those before. So that’s that sounds weird.

Jordan Boldt [00:45:59]:

It has become one of my real favorites. It’s a

Scott Cowan [00:46:02]:

Really? So why? I mean, I put this is not now we’re going off the farmer’s part of it. What is it about it that you like?

Jordan Boldt [00:46:07]:

Well, so there’s two things I like about this vendor’s product. One is they’re brand new. They got a great story. They lost their home in one of the fires in Southern Oregon last year and lost everything and took the insurance money. And instead of rebuilding, decided to move to Vancouver and pursue their dream of starting a starting a food business with their family’s recipes. And so they’re trying, struggling, working hard to be young entrepreneurs, and it’s really great to see that. The thing I really love about that so I like that story, and I wanna support that. Sure.

Jordan Boldt [00:46:37]:

Also, they’re just very passionate, and, like, the spices and the seasonings are things that you don’t normally you won’t find in most food, and I didn’t realize that until I’d had it. So it’s just really fun. I think it’s hype it’s just hyper flavorful and bright and spicy. And

Scott Cowan [00:46:54]:

So it’s got does it have heat to it then?

Jordan Boldt [00:46:56]:

Oh, yeah. Yeah. They’ve done a good job of, like, offering levels for people. Like, you know, you have to be kind of, like, careful with that, but, like, I mean, it’s got a little kick to it, and you can definitely make it a little spicier if you want. And I it’s just really flavorful stuff. You know? I yeah. It’s like I have this debate. We have, like, hot

Scott Cowan [00:47:15]:

sauce is really big right now, and I’m like, like,

Jordan Boldt [00:47:17]:

I don’t mind spicy food, but I’m not like a I’m not like one of those guys who’s like, let’s see if I can burn my face off right now. Like, I’m not one of those guys. But I do appreciate that in specifically in some, like, the Asian food that we get at the markets in that culture, like, there is a combination of, like it’s not just hot, but it’s deep and flavorful. So there’s just it’s really robust. Again, we get this similarly with, like, the Egyptian food, which would be really I mean, the more popular thing you’ve probably seen over here would be, like, Moroccan food. Mhmm. And it’s it’s it’s gonna be really it’s gonna look really similar to that in many ways. Of course, they would say, like, it’s not similar at all, but it but, I mean, there’s gonna be some symbolences there and similar warm spices.

Scott Cowan [00:47:54]:

Okay.

Jordan Boldt [00:47:54]:

Really savory potato and beef and chicken and, you know, cardamom and cinnamon and clove and all those sort of, like, fun spices. It’s a it’s it’s pretty cool. So you can see I don’t see that food anywhere else in our community really, and it’s great, to see that. It’s actually been a problem. I mean, just to go off topic a little bit, but, like, we’ve had, not to speak ill, but, like, in the past and even still, we still will have some more, I guess, what you would call, like, somewhat, at times, somewhat more traditional Asian food. You’ll see this somewhat Americanized. And, understandably, that’s a comfortable thing. It’s what you’ll see at most restaurants that you go to as an American.

Jordan Boldt [00:48:34]:

But I’ve noticed that those vendors, like the flower vendors who are largely, Mang, which is a group from, Southeast Asia. And it’s where they’re sort of where they’re where they herald from and, like, them and some of our vendors will, would be sort of work have their own menus. Right? Like, the secret menus.

Scott Cowan [00:48:54]:

Oh, gotcha.

Jordan Boldt [00:48:55]:

That’s the food we all wanted. We’d see this food and we’d be like, where is this food coming from? And we try to buy it. Maybe like, no. We don’t what are

Scott Cowan [00:49:00]:

you talking about? We don’t sell you that food.

Jordan Boldt [00:49:02]:

And so it’s like but they’d be walking out these bowls of curry and these different soups and sand and, like, rolls and sandwiches, and I’m just like, what in the world is this? This I gotta have some of this. And they’re like, oh, Americans don’t want this. White people don’t eat this food. And I’m like, no. I don’t think you understand they do. And it’s actually been really hard to convince them to sort of cook the food that they would cook for their families

Scott Cowan [00:49:23]:

with

Jordan Boldt [00:49:23]:

the recognition that actually that would is exactly what we wanna see in our market. We want you to cook authentic food that’s real to you, not we don’t want you to sell what you think people wanna buy. We want people wanna buy what you wanna sell. It’s sort of just the opposite here at a farmer’s market. People want that experience. So to have some folks begin to show up who are cooking and selling the stuff that they would eat as a family, that they would eat for themselves is is a really it’s a real fun change to some of the food in the market. So lots of good options for that. And then, honestly, what happens, you have a couple of vendors who do things like hummus or whatever at the market.

Jordan Boldt [00:49:54]:

Those types of dips do a really good job. That’s a pretty common lunch for our staff because we’re often on the go.

Scott Cowan [00:50:00]:

Right. Right. Grab a

Jordan Boldt [00:50:00]:

thing of hummus. We’ll swing by one of our farmers, grab some fresh produce, grab some fresh radishes and some fresh carrots, whatever. Go in our office, wash them up really quick, and then have ourselves a snack, and that’s what we’ll be eating.

Scott Cowan [00:50:11]:

The perks of the job sound pretty good.

Jordan Boldt [00:50:12]:

Pretty great.

Scott Cowan [00:50:13]:

I gotta say. I gotta say.

Jordan Boldt [00:50:14]:

We eat a lot. Yeah. You find a lot of food. You get a lot of lot of recipe testing, which is really fun. Vendors who are trying new products going,

Scott Cowan [00:50:20]:

I don’t

Jordan Boldt [00:50:20]:

know if this will work. Why don’t you why don’t you guys give this a shot? And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but that’s cool. That’s part of it.

Scott Cowan [00:50:25]:

That’s part of

Jordan Boldt [00:50:26]:

it.

Scott Cowan [00:50:26]:

Yeah. Yeah. I’m I’m looking at your vendor scholarship.

Jordan Boldt [00:50:33]:

Mhmm.

Scott Cowan [00:50:35]:

Elaborate on that, Parmita.

Jordan Boldt [00:50:37]:

Yeah. So, we started the foundation a couple years ago called the Vancouver Farmers Circle Foundation. It’s a separate nonprofit that exists to support, food access work, which we should talk about a little bit before we go here, and then also vendor development. And so on the vendor side, we have a scholarship program. It really came into its own during COVID. We were able to move on the stump here of, like, $40,000 through that organization to vendors directly, because we had down here, we had COVID the fir well, we had COVID all year, but it really hit hard the early part of the year, and then we had fires. And so a lot of vendors like, we had a couple of vendors lose some properties. We definitely had a lot of smoke damage and produce was you know, some animals suffered from that, and produce was tainted to be as a result of that.

Jordan Boldt [00:51:18]:

And so we were able to do COVID relief grants and fire relief grants and rebuilding efforts for vendors.

Scott Cowan [00:51:25]:

We’re able to sort

Jordan Boldt [00:51:26]:

of address, like, natural disasters or things that happen that maybe get in the way of vendors. You know, we’ve had we had a big windstorm come through a couple years ago and take out a whole vendor’s series of greenhouses, which is thousands of dollars. We’re able to to drop a couple grand on that vendor to help him get his greenhouses back up and running and, sooner and just kinda support them in that way. So we really wanna be supporting of them in that way. We also want vendors to continue developing as a business, and we want them to have access to resources. So we do a lot of work with, like, local biz like Score and the small business development centers, the SBA and Clark College here, these kind of things, to help align them with mentors to help them grow their business. And, also, we just do things like send them to conferences or pay for them to get organic certification.

Scott Cowan [00:52:11]:

Oh, wow.

Jordan Boldt [00:52:11]:

And little things we can do to help. Sometimes it’s I mean, it’s literally, like, a thousand dollars will completely change this vendor’s business. Business. You know? For 500 to a thousand dollars, they can get a product. They that will help them get over the hump of getting their product organically certified, which will allow them to charge a slightly higher price or to get a more premium or to get their product into a restaurant or whatever the case may be. And, if we can help them do that, then hopefully that endears them to our market and helps them be more successful here, which is at the end of the day, that’s our goal is to make them more successful.

Scott Cowan [00:52:41]:

Well, that’s that’s great that you’re investing in your in your partners. I mean, they you know, without without a 20 merchants on any given Saturday, your market’s not as vibrant. This is helping. That’s that’s fabulous. You mentioned access. What what did you wanna Yeah.

Jordan Boldt [00:52:56]:

So on the food access side, which is just, you know, we’re all familiar with, so we there’s a SNAP program, which is called the supplemental nutrition assistance program. More commonly, I think, people, would know that as, like, food stamps is what that used to be called. It’s a similar program. It now comes on a card. That people can swipe and it works like a debit card, and they get money put on there by the state, and they can use it for different things. They can redeem them for food benefits here at the market. So they get them they run them, get these tokens that they can then go and shop the market with, like, a currency, and vendors return it to us to redeem it. So it’s a way for folks because individual vendors to get certified, to accept Snap cards, to have there’s obviously a high level of security.

Jordan Boldt [00:53:35]:

You have to go through all the compliance efforts to do that. It’s not it’s not like you can do it’s not like running a credit card. So the result of that, we hold a license, we process all the Snap transactions, and then we reimburse the vendors for them. And so we have a system to do that. And then last year through a through a large grant, the state statewide, we’re able to offer a matching program. So we matched up to $40 dollar for dollar with additional funds for fruits and vegetables. We have these vouchers, these pictures of different products on them, and they can use Snap is good for hopefully, I get this right because it’s kind of a official thing. But, like, Snap is essentially what you’d use at a grocery store.

Jordan Boldt [00:54:09]:

So you can’t buy, like, hot food with it. You can’t, you know, that kind of scam. Go buy beer or whatever with that. I don’t think you’d like. You can buy you buy any, like, main grocery item. Obviously, produce, bread.

Scott Cowan [00:54:18]:

So we say staples, those staple items like that? Yeah. Yeah. But you can also

Jordan Boldt [00:54:21]:

do things like bread and cheese and and milk and meat and that kind of stuff. Stuff. And then

Scott Cowan [00:54:28]:

we offer this voucher

Jordan Boldt [00:54:28]:

that is good for fruits and vegetables, herbs, things like that. So, we match dollar for dollar up to $40 and, you know, and then we also do so we do that. We also participate in a program called the Farmers Market Nutrition Program, which is, in senior f Escalade senior FMNP. And what it is is through a federal program, but seniors will get these vouchers, these checks that they spend, like, cash in the market with farmers, just Washington State farmers. And then

Scott Cowan [00:54:55]:

we do a couple of other things.

Jordan Boldt [00:54:56]:

But, like, total last year was over $300,000 in food assistance moved through our market.

Scott Cowan [00:55:01]:

That’s that’s awesome. Is pretty big.

Jordan Boldt [00:55:02]:

And over 3,000 customers, in that category shopped at our market last year. So,

Scott Cowan [00:55:10]:

we

Jordan Boldt [00:55:11]:

do a lot of that. We we rolled out a new program last year, called market tours where someone from our local extension office with WSU extension and someone from local school district who we hire who’s, like, a native speaker of a language. And we are right now, we’re doing tours in English, Spanish, and Russian. They a nutritionist and an educator and one of these folks who’s a who’s also an educator who speaks the language meets with these clients, and then we tour them through the market, meet introduce them to farmers in their native language, explain products to them, show them how to shop, teach them how to use their benefits to the market, and then we do, like, a a challenge with them where they have to maybe give them free tokens and they have to go shop and then come back and share what they bought. And then nutritionist helps them come up with the recipes with the family. And then we can they can come back multiple times and get free tokens to continue shopping at the market as a family.

Scott Cowan [00:55:56]:

And That’s that’s fantastic.

Jordan Boldt [00:55:57]:

So we do lots of programs like that to sort of provide not just obviously, it’s good because our farmers are getting more sales and getting access to those customers, but then, you know, we’re trying to do what we can to make sure the market is accessible to all levels of people.

Scott Cowan [00:56:11]:

That’s that’s fantastic. On your main page and like I told you before we hit record, I’m on my iPad.

Jordan Boldt [00:56:18]:

Yeah.

Scott Cowan [00:56:19]:

I’m noticing so two things, and I and I’m afraid to click on it because I’m afraid it’ll take me out. But there’s an order online for curbside pickup. Yeah. And there’s the order your market box subscription.

Jordan Boldt [00:56:29]:

Yeah. So drink

Scott Cowan [00:56:30]:

They both sound really obvious, but help me out.

Jordan Boldt [00:56:34]:

Yeah. So during COVID, we got shut down by the city. We had COVID officially like, the official date of, like, our stay at home order was the our opening day of the market. And so the city shut us down, and it was really hard to get reopened. Everyone as you probably remember in early twenty twenty, no one knew what was going on. Everyone was freaking out. It it was it’s it’s not for it’s probably not the best topic for this conversation, but, like, it was a pretty rough time for our market here. The city was just kinda like, you can’t be here.

Jordan Boldt [00:57:01]:

You can’t do this. And the meantime, grocery stores are running out of products, and I’m going, we have farmers who are just, like, throwing product away right now who can’t sell it anywhere. And so we finally found a way we work to get open, but in the meantime, we launched an online market. We ramped up where our staff pivoted. We started an online sales channel where vendors would drop off product to us. We would repackage it. People would buy it online, and we’d repackage it. And and they’d come to the market, and we’d drop it at their cars.

Jordan Boldt [00:57:25]:

And they just do it right through where we drop it off. And we kept that going for the last two years. Not sure that we’ll be doing it this coming year for that program. As more and more people are shopping at the market, it’s becoming less and less needed. Although I continue to sort of see, like, opportunity in helping vendors move online as much as possible just to increase their exposure.

Scott Cowan [00:57:45]:

So that’s

Jordan Boldt [00:57:46]:

the online sales curbside pickup. And every Sunday, what happens is we put a walk in cooler in our office, like, in our basement. We put in a bunch of refrigerators, and we have a whole we hired up people to do this, and we have a big production line where we fill up boxes of food. And then people come, and they give us our name and order number, and we run it out to them and drop it off with their car and move a lot of products to them through their that way. About a hundred thousand dollars in sales last year for for farms at that.

Scott Cowan [00:58:09]:

I think that’s awesome.

Jordan Boldt [00:58:10]:

It’s great. It it, you know, it it doesn’t pay for itself, but it’s a really great service, and it’s an interesting thing. The market box program is a really fun new program that we’re we got a grant to do. And it’s like a CSA. Are you familiar with the CSA model, which is where customers sort of pay for a subscription? Communities agriculture is what it stands for. At a local farm, you pay up front for the year, and then you get a weekly allotment. That’s that way, but through the farmers market. So you can pay for a share, ten either ten or twenty weeks share and large or small depending on your needs.

Jordan Boldt [00:58:39]:

And we have some add on options like, you know, eggs and flowers and that kind of stuff for people who want to add those to their weekly box. Mhmm. Every week, it’s the same for everyone, but they they show up and they call us and give us our name. And one of our staff or volunteers runs out a box of their allotment for the week. It’s a assortment of Washington state produce and a couple other value added products if they purchase them from the market. Things like honey and cheese and eggs, that kind of stuff. So you just pay for that upfront, and then you get it every week for twenty weeks at the market.

Scott Cowan [00:59:08]:

That’s that’s Yeah. Wow.

Jordan Boldt [00:59:09]:

It’s a cool program. Very cool. It’s really great too for farmers because, as you can imagine, the big part of farmers market is you do all this work to build up your display and a harvest stuff. Once it’s out of the ground, you gotta sell it or throw it away. And so it’s great that they know that, like, if we’re doing, like, this year, we’re probably do over a hundred boxes, a hundred hundred subscriptions. And it’s great to, you know, we’re obviously gonna, you know, it’s great to know that, you know, this one farm is gonna be like, I’m gonna sell a hundred bunches of, egg radishes this week. Right?

Scott Cowan [00:59:37]:

Yeah.

Jordan Boldt [00:59:37]:

Which is that’s just a guaranteed sale for him. That’s money in the in the bank. He can he can pull it out of the ground and drop it in a box and take it right to us. He doesn’t have to worry about putting it in the sun or trying to hope this customer will buy it. He’s got a guaranteed sale happening at the market that week.

Scott Cowan [00:59:51]:

So to respect your time, we’ll wrap this up. I could talk to you for a long time. Yeah. So let me ask you a couple of questions, and then I wanna ask you something about yourself. So what do you see I mean, it’s hard to predict with with with COVID or whatever we wanna call it. But, you know, what do you see in the near future for the market? What what what do you think’s on the horizon?

Jordan Boldt [01:00:12]:

A lot of interesting things are on the horizon for us. So we are gonna be facing some continued pressure just to get the negative stuff out of the way up front from a a rapidly growing city that is gonna start squeezing us from a real estate and just occupancy perspective. And so we’ve gotta we’ve gotta sort of address that and find some solutions there. Those that’s the big challenge we’re facing in the next couple years. We’re also facing a real desire from our community and from some of our vendors and hopefully a few more this year to go year round. Right now we’re March through December. Mhmm. We’re hoping then by 2023, we’ll be twelve months out of the year.

Jordan Boldt [01:00:50]:

Oh, okay. During the off like, during the December you know, November, December, January, February, we’d just be, like, one day a week instead of two, and then we’ll go back to sort of a more full market during our peak season.

Scott Cowan [01:01:00]:

Okay.

Jordan Boldt [01:01:01]:

So I think you’re gonna see in the future, we’re gonna see a year round market. We’re probably gonna see at least one more midweek market. So we’re hoping to have at least four selling days a week offered throughout our city. And then we got a couple of fun projects on the way. I’d really like to find a way to get the market either off of a city street or into a more, like, formal space, potentially even a covered space, that would allow to operate on a year round basis a little more easily for customers and, vendors.

Scott Cowan [01:01:27]:

Okay.

Jordan Boldt [01:01:27]:

And then there is an area of sort of the most exciting area to me

Scott Cowan [01:01:32]:

of our city is a is a it’s it’s a it’s on a it’s on a

Jordan Boldt [01:01:35]:

place called Fourth Plain Boulevard, which is a a fascinating sector of our community and that it is it’s largely sort of the Latinx and, Asian American and other sort of BIPOC communities, neighborhoods, not exclusively, but that’s a large part of this. It’s sort of a long narrow corridor. It’s there’s also this, as a side, this interesting thing in Washington state called the cottage food law permits. So if you wanna sell, like, a packaged food or, you know, something like that, traditionally, you need to go through, like, a you

Scott Cowan [01:02:04]:

need to go through, like, a health department process of getting your kitchen, going to

Jordan Boldt [01:02:04]:

a commercial kitchen and going to, going to a commercial kitchen, and going to this whole formal expensive process. This allows you, if you’re a micro business, to do, like, up to $50,000 of sales out of your home if you get your home kitchen certified. And so this is an interesting thing. Well so that this is an opportunity for young you know, small entrepreneurs to kinda just get started, dip their toe in the water. Fourth plan has the highest percentage of cottage food law, permits per capita in our region. So all these people have this this entrepreneurship around food in this region. We would like to see an international market there that’s for that community run by that community that really supports what they’re doing. So there’s some city initiatives happening there to really sort of invigorate and support that community in a way that sort of honors them, and we wanna be part of that.

Jordan Boldt [01:02:53]:

So I think we’re hoping to have an international market, in that area in the future. So there’s a lot of fun things happening for us.

Scott Cowan [01:02:59]:

Alright. So let’s talk about you.

Jordan Boldt [01:03:02]:

What do you want

Scott Cowan [01:03:02]:

me to do? You’ve mentioned you mentioned that you grew up did you you grew up in Vancouver, area? I did.

Jordan Boldt [01:03:07]:

I was actually born right up the street from my office. Moved away moved away for a while, and then I sort of have landed back here as an adult.

Scott Cowan [01:03:15]:

So, from a career path, how did how does one end up in farmers market

Jordan Boldt [01:03:23]:

Yeah. Never on employment. I’ll tell you that right now. No one does. It’s really interesting. It’s a really interesting career path. It’s an interesting season, but, in my life, but I my my career path is interesting. I, in short, I went to WSU, and I’m still in a cougar, and I studied history and business.

Jordan Boldt [01:03:41]:

Got two degrees there. And so, I was really interested in working in business and specifically entrepreneurship was my focus. So right after college, I got a job in finance, working with small businesses like angel investors doing business plans and operations for our investments. So I worked with a lot of startups.

Scott Cowan [01:03:59]:

Okay.

Jordan Boldt [01:03:59]:

Interesting enough, some of the agriculture and food sector, but also in nothing super high-tech, but a lot of manufacturing technology. And so I got into that kind of sector for a while. And but that was during the recession and things were pretty rough. And so couldn’t get a steady paycheck and ended up getting laid off and everyone was losing jobs and no one was investing at the time. And so I went from there into the fire service. So I became a firefighter and an EMT. And I I was a firefighter and EMT for actually fifteen years. Worked for the forest service for

Scott Cowan [01:04:30]:

a while as

Jordan Boldt [01:04:30]:

a wildland firefighter, and then I was in a in here in town at a structural fire department and worked on an ambulance, and I did that for a long time. It was thought that it was a career I wanted, and I just didn’t ever I never really enjoyed it that much. It was fine, but got a little boring to be perfectly honest with you. Kind of kind of wrote. And so I was working for the city of Washougal, a small city east of here, working in their city manager’s office, doing some downtown development work, working in every one of the jobs I had there was with the farmers market, running the farmers market in addition to some other programs. And as that job was kinda coming to an end, Vancouver reached out to me and wanted me to come work here. And I said no, because I didn’t wanna work at a farmer’s market. I wanted I didn’t wanna have weekends.

Jordan Boldt [01:05:16]:

I didn’t wanna work weekends. I didn’t want the six in the morning, you know, wake up, you know, having to be at the market all day at the time. And so I said no. And they said okay. And I kept looking for a new job, and nothing came up. So they came back again, and I was like, well, I’ll come talk to you. And I ended up taking a thirty day job here on a contract to do some operations work for them. It was a really small organization at the time.

Jordan Boldt [01:05:36]:

It was definitely the largest market still in the area, but struggling in some ways with a lot of internal problems. And so address some operational things. And then, through a lot of internal drama, there’s a lot of farmers markets have drama out there. The staff was no longer employed here except for myself, and I became sort of the only the loan manager left at the market. And so I stuck around to kinda help him transition. And I was like, yeah, I’ll stick around and help you guys transition to a new leadership team. And it turns out that I was that new leadership team and, well, started with me and one part time employee. Now we’re up to 14.

Jordan Boldt [01:06:13]:

And so just like growing the business ever since. Yeah.

Scott Cowan [01:06:16]:

Alright.

Jordan Boldt [01:06:17]:

Yeah. So it’s kind of an interesting thing. It, is I’m not a farm I’m not a traditional farmer’s market manager, I guess, whatever that means, nor do I have a long history of working in the food sector or working, like, in the farm and food justice world. Like, a lot of people that is a career path that a lot of people pursue. That’s not where what got me here. My passion around this has been around being really passionate about vibrant, strong communities. Part of my growing up time was spent in Asia and living in Barcelona. And I’ve traveled extensively throughout Europe, a little bit in Asia, but definitely throughout Europe.

Jordan Boldt [01:06:49]:

And, I mean, it’s when Howard Schultz tells the story of going to Italy, sort of gave him sort of the the impetus behind starting Starbucks, sort of that idea of, like, a cafe culture.

Scott Cowan [01:07:00]:

Mhmm.

Jordan Boldt [01:07:01]:

I actually really understand the impetus behind I really get that. Right? Because I spent a lot of time in in parts of Italy and parts of I mean, all over Europe actually shopping at markets and seeing the value of communities who gather daily at their local market, supporting local makers, local producers, eating together as a friends and family, and, like, the culture that’s part of that. I’m really passionate about vibrant cities and vibrant communities and vibrant public spaces. The markets gives me a chance to dabble in that. And I’m really passionate about entrepreneurship, and I love seeing people pursue their dreams and create something from nothing and support their families. And the market has been able to allow me to sort of work in both of those sectors and sort of support those two things, which is something I’m pretty passionate about.

Scott Cowan [01:07:45]:

That’s that’s wonderful. So I typically ask my guests this question, and I didn’t know if I would ask it of you, but I’m going to. Okay. You obviously earlier, you mentioned cinnamon roll, black coffee. So we’re gonna get along just fine. Yeah. Sure. I love coffee.

Jordan Boldt [01:08:08]:

Yeah. Me too.

Scott Cowan [01:08:09]:

I, I love coffee. So tell me a place in Vancouver that I need to go to check out for coffee. I know I’m putting you on the spot. You can tell me more than one. I’ll I’ll I’ll take more than one.

Jordan Boldt [01:08:21]:

I can give you three. Perfect. Our neighbor to here by the market is a place called Cafe X Coffee, Great local roaster. The two places I and I go there on definitely, frequently, but the two places I go a lot that I just have good connections with are a place called Relevant Coffee. It’s a really phenomenal roaster here in Vancouver. Very likely, you might be able to get his beans. He’s starting to distribute, so I wouldn’t surprise him if you can find his beans in the Natchez area. You’ve

Scott Cowan [01:08:52]:

had him before. Yeah.

Jordan Boldt [01:08:52]:

You’ve had Relevant before? Yeah. Did you like it? Was it okay?

Scott Cowan [01:08:56]:

I did.

Jordan Boldt [01:08:56]:

I did. He’s a good job. And a new guy who’s he’s been around roasting sort of under the radar and has just opened a shop a few

Scott Cowan [01:09:01]:

months ago here in

Jordan Boldt [01:09:02]:

Vancouver is a guy a business by the name of Terrain Coffee. And new young business owner is a guy named Marty, and it’s really, really special stuff. He’s doing a really, really good job. He’s working directly with a lot of farmers. Actually, all three of these these coffee roasters, like, know and work with they’re in South America buying beans and knowing local farmers in that area. So it’s pretty great.

Scott Cowan [01:09:27]:

The first one say that name again?

Jordan Boldt [01:09:29]:

Kaffeex. Kaffeex is k a f I e x.

Scott Cowan [01:09:32]:

I can never pronounce that. I went there. I’ve been there. And she Baby, the owner,

Jordan Boldt [01:09:38]:

is from Mexico.

Scott Cowan [01:09:39]:

Yeah.

Jordan Boldt [01:09:39]:

Yeah. Mhmm.

Scott Cowan [01:09:40]:

Talked to her. And she did a siphon press for me Yeah. With the halogen light for the heat source, and it was like it was like some steampunk looking coffee.

Jordan Boldt [01:09:51]:

Great way to make coffee. It’s

Scott Cowan [01:09:53]:

a great way to make coffee. Yeah. That’s that’s a that’s a nice shop that she has. Yeah.

Jordan Boldt [01:09:56]:

That’s a big old man. Second location on our new waterfront. So they have Oh. Yeah. They have two locations in Vancouver now. They’re doing great.

Scott Cowan [01:10:03]:

That’s great.

Jordan Boldt [01:10:03]:

All three of those guys are sort of hitting different segments for population, and they’re just doing a great job.

Scott Cowan [01:10:10]:

That’s that’s one of them.

Jordan Boldt [01:10:11]:

Coffee breweries are brutally taken off in Vancouver.

Scott Cowan [01:10:15]:

Okay. Yeah. I I don’t drink beer anymore because it just doesn’t like me. I can have one, and it feels like I

Jordan Boldt [01:10:20]:

had one toner. Fan because I I am super handily keeping our industry afloat here in Vancouver.

Scott Cowan [01:10:26]:

Okay. Good for you. Well, yes. You gotta

Jordan Boldt [01:10:28]:

do what you gotta do. You gotta support that.

Scott Cowan [01:10:29]:

I know. I feel I feel that you’re you’re falling on your sword to help help the community. But let’s let’s really quick. Give me a couple of breweries. What’s going on in

Jordan Boldt [01:10:37]:

the brewery? There’s so many good breweries. The the one I just love the most is a brewery called Fort Side in Vancouver.

Scott Cowan [01:10:46]:

Fort Side.

Jordan Boldt [01:10:46]:

It’s sort of in Central Vancouver out of our downtown. Fort being Fort Vancouver, sort of a famous historical fort downtown in Vancouver and a great national park here.

Scott Cowan [01:10:54]:

Mhmm.

Jordan Boldt [01:10:55]:

There’s a lot of amazing breweries in Vancouver, but he is doing really creative stuff. He’s got a whole line of of, beers now that he is instead of using commercial yeast, he’s harvesting wild yeast from organic wine grapes and then and then propagating that to use in his beer making process. So he’s doing some really fun beers, especially sours with wildly wild wild harvested organic, you know, yeast from different grapes. He just continues to produce, like, really profound, really unique. He’s really focused on, like, a high quality guy. There’s also a couple of great ones, like, I mean, you know, Trapdoor Brewing and Lewitt Downtown are both, like, classic downtown breweries. They’re doing a great job with, like, the wet you know, West and East Coast IPAs.

Scott Cowan [01:11:45]:

Mhmm. And then

Jordan Boldt [01:11:45]:

what we’re seeing right now, an emerging trend in the region, which I think is we’re gonna see in the beer scene is, Victor twenty three is like my neighborhood bar. It’s my neighborhood brewery. It’s a really fun one. Victor 20 three is the route that DB Cooper’s flight took. Of course, it’s a it’s a DB Cooper themed brewery

Scott Cowan [01:12:01]:

I love it.

Jordan Boldt [01:12:01]:

Which is really fun. Because I my history my hit my thesis, my graduate thesis for my history degree was on DB Cooper. And so, sort of like the history of criminals with social heroes. And, so it’s a DB Cooper themed bar. Great beer. But what it is interestingly is it’s in a neighborhood. It’s a small spot in neighborhood. And there’s this emerging trend in our city and in Portland as well where the places to be, the really fun spots are truly neighborhood bars.

Jordan Boldt [01:12:28]:

The idea there is, like, people know you. You’re walking to it. It’s serving the people in that community. It’s not they’re not distributing a ton. It’s not a tourist destination. It’s not giant. It’s not something that was gonna feed a whole crowd, but just great local food, good local beer. It’s just a spot to gather with your friends, and that’s where a lot of stuff goes down here in Vancouver.

Jordan Boldt [01:12:47]:

So we have a number of those around our town. I’m a big fan of, like, that smaller communal That’s feel. So

Scott Cowan [01:12:51]:

That’s awesome. Alright. Last question. Great. What didn’t I ask you that I should have?

Jordan Boldt [01:12:58]:

Great question. I always ask this to job interview candidates since it’s a hard one to be on the receiving end of. What didn’t you ask me? You know, we did a pretty good job about this. I just think, like, I just I think if there’s one thing that I really like to share about farmers markets, I think it’s often forgotten is, like,

Scott Cowan [01:13:21]:

you know, when people look at

Jordan Boldt [01:13:22]:

a farmers market, regardless of where it’s at, they see a couple, you know, vinyl tints and that are popped up, and they see, you know, some folks selling vegetables or products, and that’s that’s really what they see. That’s all they see. What’s what what I think is we need to do a better job of telling the story of both locally and nationally is that there is really thriving business taking place here, and there is millions and millions of dollars moving through Washington State farmers’ markets. I mean, probably over a hundred million dollars moving through Washington State farmers’ markets every year when you think about it. And Mhmm. Maybe even more. And nationally, it’s a it’s it’s a pretty big industry. It’s supporting small farms that just do not are really struggling right now as the land prices are going up.

Jordan Boldt [01:14:13]:

Distribution models are changing. It’s really hurting small American farms, small local makers, and markets are just I just feel like they are so vital for creating a vibrant way for small businesses to connect with customers. And I think many people like, oh, yeah. Just a little market. There we always get this thing. I just move it a few blocks. It’s in the way. Or, oh, just put your move your tents tomorrow and put them here.

Jordan Boldt [01:14:35]:

And I didn’t realize, like, we’re really, like, a a to to have a really long term successful market requires a long term commitment, and there’s just some vibrant cool things happening at these places. We need to do a better job of telling that story and continue to reiterate that story to people because we’re sort of understated. Our farmers in general are bad at storytelling. We’re kinda just like we’re we’re quiet, hardworking people who just wanna sort of do that. Right? And

Scott Cowan [01:14:58]:

Mhmm.

Jordan Boldt [01:14:59]:

I respect that, but at the same time, I I see farmers markets all over sort of getting shoved around and pushed around by more pressing interest, if you will, of of the powers that be. And I just continue to think, like, you guys don’t realize how valuable the things are that are taking place here. And some of them are quantifiable and some of them are intangible, but regardless, like, they are extremely important, and they are not built overnight. And so these things take long term growth, and and they take lots of TLC to keep them going. And, I just think that communities are better, for them.

Scott Cowan [01:15:33]:

Well said.

Jordan Boldt [01:15:34]:

Thank you.

Scott Cowan [01:15:35]:

And I I I I think it’s on that, we will close. And I I appreciate you taking the time to to sit down with me today and share the story.

Jordan Boldt [01:15:43]:

Likewise, Scott. I appreciate your time.

Scott Cowan [01:15:44]:

And, I wanna check with the DB Cooper bar. But Yeah.

Jordan Boldt [01:15:50]:

That’s the town. We’ll go to the we’ll check it out.

Scott Cowan [01:15:52]:

I that that sounds like a cool theme. I mean but but your market I before we talked, I had no idea that the mark your mark the Vancouver market was as large as it is. And,

Jordan Boldt [01:16:09]:

I hope you get a chance

Scott Cowan [01:16:10]:

yeah.

Jordan Boldt [01:16:10]:

I hope you get a chance to to talk to a few other markets in the state. I think people it’s really important work you’re doing here. I think people would really be surprised at the idea that farmers’ markets are not just a few guys who pop up tents on the weekends and then go home, but there’s a whole industry taking place behind the scenes, and it’s supporting a lot of things in our community, not just the farmer. There’s there’s a lot of stuff happening at these markets. It’s it’s pretty cool.

Scott Cowan [01:16:37]:

Absolutely. Well, thank you so much.

Jordan Boldt [01:16:38]:

Hey, Scott.

Scott Cowan [01:16:50]:

Join us next time for another episode of the exploring Washington state podcast.