We love customer feedback, so keep it coming!

It is always great getting feedback from customers and journalists, regardless of whether it is positive or negative. In fact, I often like the negative feedback better because it tends to be very useful… particularly for a small food company like us. After all, we just leveraged our restaurant distribution business into the online consumer market… so, as we transition from selling to restaurants to selling to consumers… we have a lot of tweaking to do.

Laura over at the Star Bite wrote a great post about our halibut fillet. I tried to comment directly to her blog, but for some reason couldn’t… so here’s my comment:

Thanks for your story on pacific halibut… We just launched MarxFoods.com in November (we are traditionally a high-end restaurant distributor). At the time we figured that we’d be catering to “special occasion shopping” (as you aptly said), regular entertainers, people that want absolute-premium quality in bulk, and those looking for really hard to find items such as those you mentioned.

So far, we’ve been serving those segments and then some, and there have been some interesting special occasions. For example, in the end of January, we saw a spike in Kangaroo meat sales and were perplexed… we later discovered that bump was inspired by some Aussies throwing Australia National Day parties. In February, a customer ordered a case of frog legs for a leap year cooking contest! We’ve sold to University researchers studying the nutritional benefits of camelina oil, and a lot of people who appreciate the finest foods.

Halibut is expensive for sure. Believe it or not, so long as the customer is willing to buy 10 lbs., in most markets our price is competitive even with shipping added (It is selling for $21.99 in Whole Foods in the NY metro area). And, halibut isn’t available in most markets. The customers that have ordered halibut have been extremely pleased with the quality… after all, it ships direct from the facility in which it lands (read: the supply chain is a lot shorter and there are no temperature fluctuations…so, the quality is unbelievable…noticeably better than what is available through a conventional retail channel).

We’re definitely still working out some kinks and gradually working toward smaller order sizes (for example, we just lowered our fresh wild mushrooms minimum order from 5 lbs. to 2 lbs.) … but, it is hard because our entire supply chain is geared to sell to restaurants.

I thought that your assessment was very good…and, we’re always looking for feedback from eaters… so, thanks and I’d love to hear any other comments that you have…