Rick Watt has been with us for one year as Order Fulfillment Specialist working hard to develop and expand our distribution capabilities. Once our butchers cut the meat to specifications, Rick organizes products in the freezer, develops the inventory, and processes the orders fulfilling them for pick-up and delivery. He loves talking directly with customers and looking for ways to customize products to meet their specific needs. This has allowed him to develop wholesale accounts and arrange delivery to restaurants and schools through Piazza, a cold storage transportation company. He is working on a plan with other staff to offer pre-seasoned and boxed meats.
Rick started a home delivery program, so anyone can call or go on-line to make an order for delivery all over the country! It began with a family from Arizona looking for allergen-free meats for their children with corn allergies. Once word got around, he began delivering to more families concerned about their children’s allergies. He is currently working with FedEx and shipping product to South Carolina, Washington, Virginia, Michigan, Colorado, and Arizona; and last week he shipped summer sausage all the way to California in a custom box with ice packs and liners keeping product cold during travel.
He has created several exciting new sales accounts by developing various partnerships. On one account, he followed up after Jessica became the procurement committee head with the Indiana Farm to School Network and they realized that food service workers needed culinary training for cooking from scratch in order to offer fresh meats in school lunches. This led to Rick work with Cathy Powers at Culinary Nutrition Associates to provide meat across seven locations in Indiana this summer as part of a series of Culinary Skills workshops designed for school nutrition professionals, a program sponsored by the Indiana Department of Education School and Community Nutrition.
Rick loves what we do here at This Old Farm and why we do it. He promotes the value of eating locally processed meats that are produced naturally the way they once were to bring money back to the local economy.