How Little Wings Farm made fresh food more accessible with Paperform

Learn how Little Wings Farm, a mixed produce and fruit farm in Eugene, Oregon, uses Paperform to keep its processes (and its produce) extra fresh.

Little Wings Farm, a mixed produce and fruit farm in Eugene, Oregon, faced the challenge of managing a large number of CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) customers who needed to submit weekly produce selections. To streamline this process, they turned to Paperform, which offered a simple and efficient solution. Customers found it easy to use the produce selection forms on various devices, and the farm was able to cut down the time spent on the weekly harvest sheet from over an hour and a half to just half an hour. Paperform also allowed the farm to offer customers choices within categories, providing a customized experience while still maintaining control. The platform's mobile-friendliness and reliable record-keeping were additional benefits. Moreover, the farm expanded its use of Paperform for vacation requests, questionnaires, farm events, and more. Little Wings Farm now enjoys efficient processes, increased customer satisfaction, and a focus on producing quality and sustainable produce.

Highlights

• The farm uses Paperform to give customers the power of choice without the complexity of total control.
• Customers enjoy how easy and accessible the farm’s produce selection forms are, regardless of what device they’re making their selections on.
• Paperform significantly reduced the amount of time spent on the weekly harvest sheet, slashing time spent from upwards of an hour and a half down to only a half hour.
• The farm continues to find unique ways to use Paperform, including questionnaires, vacation requests, and farm event sign-ups.

Overview

1. **Challenge:** Little Wings Farm needed a form solution that was simple and intuitive not only for the farm’s staff, but also for the farm’s customers—many of whom need to complete a form every week as part of the farm’s Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program.
2. **Solution:** After exploring several different options, Little Wings Farm turned to Paperform to deliver a straightforward customer experience as well as a streamlined process for the farm’s team members. Using Paperform, the farm’s customers can easily submit their produce selections for the week, set up vacation requests to skip produce pickup, and sign up for other farm events and programs.
3. **Results:** Little Wings Farm’s customers are delighted with how simple Paperform makes the produce selection process. The farm even showcases the selection form on its website to demonstrate how approachable the process is. Our platform cut down on manual work and administrative headaches too. The staff can now complete the farm’s harvest sheet in under a half hour—far quicker than the hour and a half it was taking with other, clunkier solutions.

About

Little Wings Farm, a 10-acre farm located on the Willamette River in Eugene, Oregon, is focused on a few important things: sustainability, community, and darn good produce.

The farm grows fruits, berries, and vegetables that are all hand-harvested. About half of the farm’s business focuses on selling produce to natural food stores and local restaurants, while the other half is made up of a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program—you might also hear it called a “cropshare.”

That program works like this: Customers pay a flat fee for the season to receive a weekly box filled with delicious produce. Each box has some staple items (like salad mix, carrots, or seasonal favorites).

But Little Wings Farm’s approach is unique in that customers also receive a weekly selection form to pick their own produce in a variety of categories. Customers then pick up their packed box at one of the designated pickup locations around town and get to enjoy fresh, locally-grown produce.

Providing delicious fruits and veggies is at the heart of Little Wings Farm, but the organization also has a focus on sustainability. The farm grows cover crops (which help with conservation), reserves certain areas of the farm as flowering habitat for insects, and resists the use of single-use plastics in the production of crops. That means Little Wings Farm’s produce isn’t just good for people—it’s good for the planet too.

The challenge

But doing that much good outside requires quite a bit of work inside the farm, in the form of refined and streamlined internal processes.

With over 200 CSA customers—most of which are making produce selections every week during the season—there’s a lot of information to manage. “It’s pretty complicated trying to keep track of all these things,” says Karen Olsen. Karen’s daughter, Rosie, is a co-owner of the farm and now Karen helps with all of the bookkeeping and order processing.

This task is made even more complicated by the fact that the information is both ever-changing (customers’ selections change week to week) and time-sensitive.

Karen is the one who’s responsible for making sense of all of the selections that customers submit through their forms. She uses that to prepare a harvest sheet for her daughter so “she can be ready first thing in the morning with her crew to know what she’s going to harvest.”

“We started off using Google Docs and it was pretty rough,” Karen explains. So, Karen tested out a number of other solutions in hopes of finding something that offered the flexibility they needed yet was still simple enough for the farm’s staff and customers.

The solution

The farm found what it needed in Paperform. “Even after we checked out a lot of things this year, we ended up back at Paperform,” Karen says. “None of them, so far, have offered the flexibility that we have on Paperform.”

“Even after we checked out a lot of things this year, we ended up back at Paperform.”

While forms might not be the first thing you think of when you picture farming, our platform has helped Little Wings Farm transform its operations in several meaningful ways.

1. Choices for customers, control for the farm

Most CSA programs have the same basic premise: Customers pay for a subscription and get a box of produce. But what makes Little Wings Farm different is that customers have some options—they can make selections in certain produce categories and build a box that’s unique to them.

That amps up the appeal of the program, but it also makes it a bit more cumbersome to manage. “Let’s say she has strawberries and blueberries,” Karen says of Rosie and the farm. “She can’t give strawberries to everybody. She can’t give blueberries to everybody.”

That’s when Little Wings Farm puts the ball in the customers’ court—they send customers a selection form they use to pick whether they want strawberries or blueberries. That means customers get a more customized box while still being mindful of the farm’s production capacity.

This is the biggest area where Paperform stands out. “The thing that we’re able to do in Paperform that we’re not able to do on any other platform is to offer people selections in categories,” Karen shares.

“The thing that we’re able to do in Paperform that we’re not able to do on any other platform is to offer people selections in categories.”

This feature makes it easy for customers to indicate what they want, but the farm still gets to dictate categories, options, and even limits. “There’s a little bit of control over what people are getting, but still a lot of selection,” Karen adds.

2. Straightforward selections (and a delightful experience)

A weekly produce box could have anywhere from seven to 14 items in it, depending on the size the customer purchased. The customer doesn’t get to choose all of them—some items are consistent across all boxes.

But for the items customers do have some say over, they need an easy way to get that information over to the farm ahead of when the produce is harvested and the boxes are packed.

Every week, the farm emails customers a link to a form where they can submit their choices. They also have the option to complete another form (what Little Wings Farm calls the “add-on form”) to add additional items to their box, which includes photos of the specialty items.

Since this is a process that customers have to go through week after week during the season, it was important to the farm that it be as quick and painless as possible. “Most of the sites we saw were just clunky,” Karen explains.

And, since a good portion of the farm’s customers complete their selections on their phone, the forms needed to be mobile-friendly—without jumbled formatting, distorted images, and endless scrolling. “Paperform’s presentation is so compact,” she adds.

3. Simple and streamlined order packing

Customers get two or three days to complete the form and make their selections. When those submissions come through, they’re exported to a CSV and used to make labels for the customers’ orders.

For the farm, this process highlights a few other standout features of Paperform:

• It’s easy to export form responses directly to a CSV where they can work with the data and create labels for the boxes.
• The farm can add SKUs to each product (Karen gives “juicy, delicious, green, and wonderful lettuce” as an example). “We can give it as long of name as we want,” she says. “Then, with Paperform, you can just change that to a SKU.”

All of that means the order picking and packaging process is way more efficient (and has way fewer headaches and mistakes).

4. Reliable customer order confirmations

Karen also loves that Paperform acts as a reliable record of customer orders. “It’s great because it gives me something to check things back against,” she says.

For example, a customer might insist that they ordered two salad mixes but only receive one in their box. Within Paperform, Karen can easily go back to their original submission and check what was actually ordered.

When customers complete their selection form, they also have the option to receive a receipt if they want that record of their own order. “I encourage people to do it, but if they don’t want it, they don’t have to,” Karen explains. “Either way, it’s stored in Paperform so I can go back and check it.”

5. Questionnaires, signups, and customer requests

Using Paperform for the weekly CSA boxes has been so successful that Little Wings Farm has started using the platform in a variety of other ways, including:

• Vacation request forms: Customers can submit forms to let the farm know when they’re on vacation and don’t need a produce box for that week. “It works really slick for that,” Karen says.
• Customer questionnaires: The farm often uses short forms to collect customer feedback and insights.
• Farm events: As just one example, the farm used Paperform to allow people to sign up for “you pick” berry slots, when they could come to the farm and pick their own berries.

Because the farm is so community-minded, it continues to find ways to use forms to involve customers in the process and generate more interest and enthusiasm for farming.

6. Supportive and superior customer service

Karen isn’t shy about the fact that customer service is another area where Paperform stands above the rest. After a particularly unhelpful interaction with a previous form provider, Karen says she was delighted with Paperform’s dedication to its customers.

“I have contacted customer service with Paperform a few times,” she says. “They’ve always been really great—very helpful and patient. It’s nice to have a platform where you can count on somebody to help you if you need it.”

“It’s nice to have a platform where you can count on somebody to help if you need it.”

The results

At Little Wings Farm, Paperform helped transform processes that were previously tedious and time-consuming into ones that are efficient and far less effort-intensive.

Here are a few notable outcomes since implementing Paperform on the farm:

• Karen has to spend far less time on the harvest sheet. She says it took her upwards of an hour and a half with other providers. Now, she can get it done in only a half hour—that’s at least an hour of time savings every single week.
• Paperform empowers and enables Little Wings Farm to continue to offer customers options and some control, a feature that isn’t common with most CSA boxes.
• The farm positions the easy selection process as a competitive differentiator, even showcasing videos of the selection forms directly on its website to show people how simple it is.

Little Wings Farm has experienced plenty of tangible results since moving over to Paperform. But if they had to sum up the biggest win, we’d guess they’d go with something like this: They get to spend less time and energy focused on processes and more time and energy focused on produce and the planet.

Painless processes with Paperform

You might not be harvesting fruits and veggies, but Paperform can help you freshen up your own business processes. Sign up for free—no credit card required.