Stephanie Kontz Myers, owner of The Farmhouse Table in Colman, South Dakota, has served the Brookings Farmers Market with her baked goods since summer 2022. Myers has spent her whole life cooking and baking and loves it.
“I grew up on a farm. And we provided our hired help with morning coffee and a sweet treat that was always baked, and I started helping my mom with that at a very early age,” she says.
She has kept her love for baking and cooking while raising her own family. As her kids have gotten older, she’s had more time to focus on her baking passion and think about sharing her love of baked goods. To have an outlet for them, Myers decided to become a vendor at the Farmers Market.
“I was still a really young business, and I thought it was a good way to kind of grow a customer base by going to the Farmers Market and being a regular there, getting to know the community in that sense,” Kontz Myers says.
Although she produces general baked goods, she specializes in “breakfast baking” – sweetbreads, cinnamon bread, banana bread, and other morning treats.
One thing Kontz Myers has learned over the last couple of years is to go with the seasonal flow of the market. “As someone with a perishable product, my stuff is not going to be held for a week,” she says. “So, it was really the first couple of years I really tracked sales week by week, so I can see over the season kind of what times of year are going to have the greatest number of customers, and I know to bake more.”
From observing the market’s life cycle, Kontz Myers has learned how changes in foot traffic boost overall sales.
“Specialty events will always help increase the crowd down there,” she says. “Some weekends they have extra things going on, like they’ll have live music there, or they’ll have a yoga class in the park or children on the grass of the courthouse or some children’s acts and activities going on, and those always seem to draw in a few more people than just on a regular weekend.”
Suppose you are itching to try baked goods from The Farmhouse Table. In that case, Kontz Myers has a couple of recommendations for new customers. “My cinnamon bread is a pretty classic, sweet loaf of bread with a swirl of cinnamon sugar and a cinnamon glaze on top of it.” Or if you’re in a muffin mood, the “lemon blueberry muffins are extremely popular and sell out every single weekend.”
If you like supporting small businesses as well as a home-based bakery, take the time to stop by the Brookings Farmers Market and visit The Farmhouse Table’s booth.
