Stock for the flock

Consumers are increasingly demanding food transparency and favoring local options, making backyard chickens an attractive option, especially for young families. A small flock of hens is a natural addition to a backyard vegetable garden, so what better place than a local garden center to shop for supplies? And it’s a great way to keep customers coming back for supplies for their broods.

Whether you’re diving into the potential for hard goods like bedding and feed, or considering offering live chicks in the spring, there are several considerations to make. We spoke with two garden centers about the potentials and pitfalls of adding poultry care to their stores.

May I take your order?

When it comes to offering live chicks, pre-ordering is key to avoiding disappointment. Masterson’s Garden Center in East Aurora, New York, has been offering several unique breeds of chicks for about 20 years, and customers get so excited that they start reaching out about chicks right after the holidays.

“People that know we get in different varieties and tend to be waiting to see what we’ve picked so that they can add something new or different to their flock,” says Erin Masterson Holko, co-owner.

She typically puts her order in with the local hatchery around mid-January. Then, she’ll load the options onto the garden center’s website, start putting the word out on social media and open pre-orders. By the time chicks arrive around the end of March, most have already been sold.

Most years, Masterson Holko has needed to increase orders rather than decrease, but the process helps her avoid over-ordering. And in the event that she does over-order, she has the option to cancel right up until the day the chicks ship from the hatchery. “Most hatchers will let you do that,” she says. “They’re sending out millions of birds so they don’t care that you can’t pull your couple hundred.”

Primex Garden Center in Glenside, Pennsylvania, has also relied on pre-ordering to keep customers happy and to keep the store from getting too full, says Nickie Goldstein, hard goods buyer. The IGC carried live chickens for about a decade up until 2021.

“When chickens are a couple weeks old, they’re not so cute anymore,” she says. “And we wanted to sell chickens, not raise them, so we pre-sold them, which worked really, really well.”

Advance orders also create excitement around chick pickups. At Masterson’s, each customer gets a tracking number that they can follow to see when their new feathered friends will arrive. On the big day, Masterson Holko sorts chicks into individual orders and loads them up into “chick to-go boxes” for customers to take home.

Masterson’s and Primex both order a few extra chicks for those who didn’t pre-order, and so that no one is upset if some of the chicks don’t survive the trip. But if all of the little birds arrive happy and healthy, and pass inspection, the extras go up for sale as well.

At the end of the sale, any unclaimed chicks at Masterson’s are usually sold through a social media campaign or two. Following those efforts, any orphans end up going home with Masterson Holko. “Generally, I don’t have to take too many home, but my house is crazy so adding a few more chicks every year is nothing,” she says with a laugh.

Shipping shock

Like stocking live plants, stocking live birds takes some TLC from employees.

Primex took a break from live chicks during the pandemic in 2020, and had great sales the following year, but due to unreliable shipments from the US Postal service, some of the chicks arrived dead or dying.

“It was a little bit tragic,” Goldstein says. “It wasn’t half of them or anything, but it was in the teens and it was just too many. We’re all animal lovers here and it’s too much to see that.”

Even though the garden center would order overnight shipping, sometimes deliveries would take days to arrive. And without food or water — plus weather fluctuations — some chicks couldn’t make it. So the IGC made the difficult decision to stop offering them.

Stress over the health wellbeing of birds is definitely the hardest part of the job for Masterson Holko as well. “Being an animal-lover, as soon as you open a box, you just hope that everybody’s okay,” she says, noting that the garden center has lost entire shipments in the past. “That part is really hard because it does happen sometimes that they just don’t do well.”

With the increase in interest around backyard chicken keeping in the past few months, Primex has been considering bringing back live chicks, but still has concerns about shipping live birds through USPS, which is the only way the nearby hatchery will send them.

“I think if we had known that this trend was going to go back up, we might have thought a little more about bringing them back in,” Goldstein says. “We’re not completely against the idea of bringing them back, but the postal service hasn’t gotten any better. But I think there’s definitely more interest again now than several years ago.”

Standing out from the crowd

When it comes to picking out breeds, Masterson Holko does her best to choose varieties that nearby farm supply stores won’t have in stock like Lavender Orpington or Starlight Green Egger. And for versatility, she opts for breeds that can provide either eggs or meat.

Cold hardiness is also crucial for her Buffalo-area customers, but the most important aspect of choosing chickens is the colorful eggs. “Most of our customers just want birds and pretty eggs to take a picture of,” Masterson Holko says. “And so in light of that, I tend to choose a good variety of colors of eggs because it’s way more fun to have a basket full of pretty colored Easter eggs. It makes a good Instagram post.”

Masterson’s leans into the Instagram craze, encouraging customers to tag them on social media. Plus, then staff can watch each chicks’ progress. Masterson Holko, in particular, follows along avidly.

“I always tell people sort of jokingly, ‘I’m personally invested in your chicks now. I wiped that chicken’s butt when it got here, so let me know how it’s doing as you go on. So we do have a little bit of a relationship because of that. ”

Chick accessories

Besides live chicks, Masterson’s carries mostly everything customers need to care for their new feathered friends from organic feed to layer pellets to medication. Being a one-stop shop for chicks and supplies is crucial selling point for Masteron’s, saving customers from picking up their new chicks in one location and having to drive somewhere else for supplies.

Although Primex has stopped carrying live chicks for the time being, the IGC still carries supplies like meal worms, medications, bedding and treats, which have been selling well for a decade or so. Their location near Philadelphia isn’t near many Tractor Supply stores, so it’s an ideal location for backyard chicken keepers who don’t want to trek too far.

And as the price of chicken feed has increased drastically, it’s important to consider your proximity to a farm store since a typical garden center can’t compete on the bulk prices they can get. “They sell chicken feed for cheaper than we can even buy it,” Goldstein says. “They have a huge assortment of things and the prices are low, but it’s suburban here so it’s a nice place people in this area can go where they don’t have to drive 20 miles to get their chicken supplies.”

Overall, the poultry departments at both Masterson’s and Primex are small, making up a small fraction of overall sales. Primex usually keeps a single 3-foot end cap of supplies in store and takes orders for larger bags of feed at the register. They’ll load those directly into customers’ cars from the warehouse.

Masterson Holko estimates that her IGC’s entire farm department is about 10% of sales, with chickens making up the majority. But their main homestead revenue comes from beekeeping supplies.

“Beekeeping is our big thing, so that’s why chickens happen pretty easily for us. Chickens are the gateway drug to bees, I think,” she says, noting that Masterson’s is one of the only places in the area that carries beekeeping supplies. “A lot of those customers are crossover and are doing both. We’re sort of playing with the whole homestead/farmstead group of people that we’ve had really luck with. So it’s not a huge department but I think it serves our customers well to be able to offer them that.”

Chickens 101

During the times Primex carried live chicks, the store hosted chicken care classes every spring and fall to help customers succeed with their flocks, and the store still offers books on chicken care.

To help newer chicken keepers get started, Masterson’s works with one of the bigger hatcheries in the area to provide education. And while they don’t offer any formal classes, Masterson Holko is always available by email. Plus, customers are welcome to stop in for help.

“When people come into the store, we do tend to spend a lot of time one-on-one educating new chicken people. And as much as I’m not a chicken doctor, we get lots of chicken calls all spring about what’s going on,” Masterson Holko says. “So we provide ongoing health education, but nothing scheduled or formal. We really just tend to direct people toward the resources that have been created by the people who are really good at it.”