5 Business Lessons to Learn From a Himalayan Mulberry Fruit Farm

On Saturday, my family and I picked and filled 14 boxes of yummy fruit from trees at the biggest u-pick mulberry fruit farm in the United States.

Thousands of city folks also drove out to the various remote u-pick farms for the paid experience of picking fresh fruit off of the trees.

As I was standing in the hot sun in the orchard over one hour away from home reaching for the delicate low-hanging fruit, I wondered why I was there on the farm.

Here are five business lessons that I observed from the Habitera Farm from Brentwood California that we can apply to any business, AI-based or not.

1. Provide Customers What They Want

Mulberry is a tasty superfruit, rich in vitamins, fiber, and other nutrients. You may have heard that mulberry trees in China famously fed silkworms for the luxury silk industry. These same trees, with multiple variants, also produce the healthy sweet mulberry fruit that people eat and enjoy.

Customers want healthy and tasty foods. The Himalayan Purple Mulberry (also known as the Pakistan Mulberry) is a particularly sweet and nutritious fruit. This is the one variety grown at the Habitera farm. These mulberries often sell out early at farmers’ markets.

If you start a business, AI-based or not, be sure it delivers something that people actually want.

2. Go Where There’s Less Competition

How often do you see fresh mulberry in big chain US supermarkets? Not often yet.

Instead, you might find mulberry fruit at local farmers’ markets, grown at much smaller farms than those for more common fruits like apples and oranges. The mulberry fruit is fragile with a short shelf-life which makes it harder to transport and distribute at scale to mass markets.

You also don’t commonly see mulberry trees at homes in cities and suburbs because the ripe fruits that drop off the branches often cause messy stains on the ground. Homeowners don’t commonly have mulberry trees in their yards.

As a result, there are relatively few sources of fresh mulberry fruit in the US, and thus less competition. Habitera Farm is the largest commercial mulberry farm in the US at only 90 acres.

If you start a business, AI-based or not, take an intelligent risk in building a product or service that’s relatively hard for other businesses to deliver at scale, but relatively easy for you to do with your special competitive edge. Perhaps you have the advantage of being local in a fragmented industry, or you have a government-issued patent, or you have had special training and certification.

3. Prepare the Entire Customer Experience

In seasonal businesses, there’s often a short sales period that determines the success for the entire year. The u-pick season for harvesting mulberry fruit at Habitera Farm is only two months.

When the fruit is ready and the doors are open for the u-pick customers, everything else in the business should already be ready too:

• The trained workers and signage.
• The parking and temporary restroom facilities.
• The website, reservation system, and payment processing.
• The marketing and publicity.

The entire customer experience needs to be ready, in addition to the ripening fruit. A better customer experience will lead to more repeat customers and more word-of-mouth referrals.

If you start a business, AI-based or not, make sure the entire end-to-end customer experience of your business is well-designed including the non-glamorous non-AI portions.

4. Build a Consistent Brand

Habitera Farm started opening up to u-pick customers only one year ago. Yet, they’ve already built a solid Very Mulberry brand and distribution.

For a privately owned farm, their media highlights are savvy. They get publicity from local news, partnerships with other businesses, and social media. In addition, they get publicity via word of mouth as customers tell their friends where to get the tasty and nutritious food.

They maintain consistent branding through these channels.

The farm’s origin story remains consistent as founder Anil fondly remembers tasty fruits while growing up in Delhi India to later inspire him to start a fruit farm. The farm also consistently brands itself as the biggest US mulberry farm producing the tasty and healthy Himalayan mulberry superfood. The limited u-pick season and required reservation system all build a brand image that emphasizes scarcity, which justifies the premium pricing.

If you start a business in any industry, AI-based or not, invest in building your brand, ideally through reputable media outlets and word-of-mouth in addition to social media and paid media.

5. Develop One Niche But Multiple Distribution Channels

Habitera Farm grows only one product: fresh Himalayan Mulberry fruit. It’s a relatively unique niche product in the US, with less competition.

It’s easier to become number one in a small niche—to be the “biggest mulberry farm in the United States.”

By comparison with cherries, I counted 46 cherry farms in my Brentwood area map where customers can u-pick or buy cherries. With so many choices, which cherry farm should customers go to?

Although Habitera Farm grows only one niche fruit, it has developed multiple distributions:

• farmers’ markets in the SF Bay Area
• partnership with a healthy fast food chain
• u-pick customers who come to the farm
• handful of specialty grocers and online retailer
• and preserved mulberry jam versions of the fruit for year-round sales

They reach their customers through multiple distribution channels.

In Habitera Farm, they also understand that a big portion of their customers are Chinese language speakers. The signage on the farm for u-pick customers is written in both English and Chinese. Their website is translated into Russian and Spanish too. The farm understands their end consumers and accommodates them.

If you start a business, AI-based or not, you can generally enter the market with one niche. Being in one niche will help you better understand your ideal customers along with a clearer path to becoming the number one in that niche. You can then develop multiple distribution channels to reach out to more customers and consider adjacent niches later as you build your brand.

Final Thoughts

On Saturday, I picked the literal low-hanging fruits off the mulberry tree branches. Other taller people were able to reach more fruit.

Some experienced pickers even brought fruit-picking devices on poles to reach the higher untouched fruit. For people not gifted with height, they were able to use technology so long as they were prepared and had learned from prior experience.

In your career, business, and life, I hope you can also benefit from prior experiences of people and technologies. I share the above business lessons with you to help you towards your goals.

If you would like more help from me, please reach out to schedule a call to discuss your goals and explore how I can help you.

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Jimmy Wong Coach, speaker, and entrepreneur enabling people to thrive in the age of AI. Data science leader with 12 years experience at the LinkedIn company and 27 years in the industry. Visit aijimmy.com​ ​​​​​​

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