Located in Lucas, Texas, Profound Microfarms produces high quality, aquaponic and hydroponic lettuces, herbs, and microgreens. Farmer Jeff Bednar and his team work with LFM to provide sustainable greenhouse products to hundreds of restaurants and discerning chefs throughout the region of North Texas. In 2018, Jeff and other local farmers teamed up to form Profound Foods, a farmer-owned food hub providing North Texas Grown artisan produce, meats, and dairy to farm-to-table restaurants.

We recently had the opportunity to speak with Jeff Bednar and Josh Montgomery of Profound Foods about how LFM helps them maximize their online sales system.

LFM: Hello, Jeff and Josh! Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today. Firstly, how does the LFM software platform help you to increases profitability and maximize sales?
JOSH: Before LFM, Jeff (my boss) was just taking orders completely over the phone, by text, e-mails, but most of the time people were calling their orders in. Then, orders were put in manually using the Square system. Since implementing LFM, the online ordering system has saved us 16-18 hours per week. It’s definitely helped us scale up a whole lot quicker. We can just tell our new customers and people signing up to create an online profile and then view all of our products.
In the past, Jeff would build something in Word, send it in an e-mail to prospective customers, and then take orders over the phone. We still send out an e-mail every week, but it’s now just pointing people towards our LFM online storefront. It’s saved us a lot of time.

LFM: In terms of your processes after you receive orders, how do you currently use LFM? How does that process compare to before using LFM?
JOSH: We do two delivery days right now, so we rely on LFM to send the pick lists to farmers. Then, every morning on the delivery day, we print out the pack list and use the pack list to verify that all the farmers have brought everything, that everything is in the totes, and that everything has been harvested. Most of the product comes from Profound Microfarms, so we use that list as a harvest list to figure out what to harvest, as well.
Basically, everything will come in and we use a pack list to put everything in totes. Then we have a meat list to make sure all the weights are written correctly, and then we enter the weights into the LFM system. After all of that is done and there are no more changes, we print off and sort invoices for our customers, and then we deliver the products.
Before LFM we would have to collect all of the order information from e-mails and create our own lists. We couldn’t have done what we’re able to do now with that old system. We are able to ship exponentially more products than before when we had to put all the lists together in the early morning.

LFM: How has the LFM software impacted your product harvest, pack, and distribution process?
JEFF: LFM has definitely given us more clarity – before it was way more chaotic. We are able to work with many more vendors with the automated system. We would not be able to work with as many vendors if we had to communicate to 34 farmers and ranchers if the system weren’t automated. That would severely limit the amount of producers we can work with on a daily basis.

LFM: Can you explain some ways your overall sales and distribution processes changed once you implemented LFM software?
JEFF: We went from working with 25 restaurant customers to over 100 since implementing the software over a year ago. We were able to scale to do 4x as many customers as what we had thought. I wouldn’t have had time to do the marketing side without the 18 hours we save each week with LFM.

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