Maybe you had to sacrifice half a head of lettuce before you got to the good part. Maybe it started to spoil before you could use it all. Maybe it just plain didn’t look or taste good. It’s true what they say. You get what you pay for. And, if you’re spending less for bargain vegetables, you’re probably getting less, too. Less flavor. Less nutrition. Less texture. Less beauty. Less shelf life. At The Chef’s Garden, we are fanatical about quality, and that comes at a price. “Good enough” doesn’t cut it, even if it costs us less. We want our chefs to get the absolute most that they can for their money. So when you order a box of farm-fresh vegetables from us, you can be confident that the contents are as close to 100 percent useable as we can make them. We think that’s a pretty good deal.
It also fits with our values and our commitment to quality. In today’s throwaway culture, investing in quality isn’t much of a priority anymore. Most of us would rather buy five inexpensive suits off the rack instead of one superior, custom-fit suit that could last darned near a lifetime. Our grandmothers didn’t go through Teflon-coated pans like Kleenex. They cooked on good old indestructible cast iron skillets that were perfectly seasoned and stick-free for years and years of faithful use. It’s called an investment. Of course, we know and respect the fact that our chefs have bottom lines to consider. And we get it that the lure of “cheaper” can seem like the more economical choice. But cheaper trickles down to the restaurant customer, and we think they deserve to get what they pay for too.
Our prices reflect a number of things. Certainly they reflect the superior quality of everything we grow. But they also reflect our commitment to harvesting every single one of our fresh vegetables, herbs and edible flowers by hand. We hand-trim them. We hand-pack them. And we don’t touch one single thing until a chef places an order for it. Then we do everything in our power to fill that order exactly, so that every single thing in the box is as close to perfect as possible, with the longest shelf-life possible. No damage. No spoilage. No waste. No “good enough.” No kidding. Simply put, when you buy from The Chef’s Garden, you’ll get exactly what you paid for. All of what you paid for. We work too hard to let anything but the best leave our farm. In a side-by-side, cost per serving comparison between us and a bargain brand, we’d bet you’ll agree with us. Our farm-fresh vegetables are a pretty big deal.