Farm Wide Update: Finding Our Feet Off-Farm

Hey there, Hillsiders!

This month has been incredible and, rather unexpectedly, we’ve had a few things come together beautifully. The farm itself has actually felt a little ‘business as usual’ - we’ve found the groove, finally - things have been motoring along, more piglets 😍 another batch of chickens processed 🐓 and more animals than ever before 👨‍🌾👩‍🌾

Last month we announced that we’d be attending Carriageworks Farmers Market weekly - something we’d been working towards for close to 6-months. This month we’ve seen the culmination of all that effort come together, adding nearly a dozen new products 🍗🥩 to our range online and at the markets (more detail on what’s new below). Just in time for a moment of success.

The success we’ve seen this month has been overwhelming, amazing and truly invigorating - right as the winter cold snap sets in. ❄️ We were so excited to add so many new products but also concerned. How on Earth were we going to sell all this meat! With our freezers stuffed to the brim we knew we had to improve our reach online - but how? Word of mouth was consistently bringing new people to us, but just not fast enough and paid ads weren’t working. We realised that we’ve never really tried simply telling our story 📚, and so we started a series of posts designed to do just that - explain who we are, what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. The challenges, the mistakes, the ups and the downs.

Just two posts into the series, we reached 180k people in little more than a week 🤯

This led to an unexpected and somewhat meteoric influx of new followers, subscribers and customers - to all the new Hillsiders: Welcome to the Hillside Farm Family! 💚

Now, a little about our new products.

🐓 🐓 We sent nearly half our chicken batch for butchering and launched a new range of delicious chicken products - from what turned out to be mind blowingly good chicken sausages, to the usual suspects like mince, breasts, wings, thighs, drumsticks, necks and stock packs - all beautifully cut, packed and labelled by the fabulous Emilio’s Butchery.

🐄 🐄 We’ve also launched an entirely new product range - one that many of you have been eagerly waiting for a long time - our grass-fed grass-finished beef! While there’s more beefy products coming, at the time of writing this newsletter, we’ve launched our beef mince, sausages (thick and thin), burger patties and bone broth packs. We’ll be adding some braising/low n slow cuts over the coming days.

🐖🐖 We’ve expanded our pork range beyond value boxes to include some of our most popular porky cuts like mince, sausages (thick and thin), steaks, roasts and more.

All these are now available online and, as always, we’ll have our widest range at Carriageworks Farmers Market every Saturday.

Can you believe we’re still working in the background on even more products! And they’re going to be so good 🤤