From January 7 – February 8, Food+Tech Connect and The Future Market are hosting Biodiversity: The Intersection of Taste & Sustainability, an editorial series featuring interviews with over 45 leading food industry CEOs, executives, farmers, investors and researchers on the role of biodiversity in the food industry. See the full list of participants and read about why biodiversity in food is important here. 

We have been talking about incorporating more biodiverse ingredients into products and our diets over the last month, but where do you find those ingredients? Since 1996, Slow Food has been building the International Ark of Taste, a database of nearly 5,000 endangered foods from over 150 countries. With this database it hopes to catalogue and encourage greater use of foods forgotten by the industrial food industry. It is also launching campaigns to raise awareness of these endangered food. This spring, it is incentivizing 3,000 farmers, school gardens and Slow Food chapters to plant the seeds of endangered crops.

Below, I speak with Slow Food USA Executive Director Richard McCarthy about how the organization is encouraging greater diversity in regional food sheds. He argues for the need to move from mass production and monocropping to reclocalizing our foods to make them culturally and ecologically appropriate.

Danielle Gould: How does your organization define and think about biodiversity?

Richard McCarthy: Slow Food sees biodiversity as natural assets to be preserved and utilized.

DG: What is your organization doing or planning to do to promote biodiversity?

RM: Inspired by the idea that we must “eat it, to save it,” we believe that storing seeds is not enough. It is important to create popular excitement for heritage breeds and seeds. Slow Food’s living catalogue of endangered foods, the Ark of Taste, is our primary tool to identify and recognize foods that the world of industrial food deems archaic, unuseful and destined to be left behind. Of course, we feel differently. These are the foods that provide more options for farmers, gardeners, cooks and chefs to navigate gastronomic decisions in an age of climate change. With Slow Food’s desire to trigger behavior change, we launch campaigns to draw connection between individual choice and systems change. This spring, we will incentivize 3,000 farmers, school gardens and Slow Food chapters to Plant A Seed of Ark of Taste vegetables to popularize forgotten seeds.

DG: What does an ideal biodiverse food system look like? How do you measure biodiversity, and when will we know when we’ve arrived at a “good” level of biodiversity?

RM: An ideal biodiverse food system is one in which every region brands itself as “home of ______.” The tyranny of scale shoves farmers, chefs and flavors down a narrow corridor to plant the same products. This industrial thinking is what has yielded the 90 percent decrease in biodiversity in North America in the last 100 years. Even progress to counter these trends conform to industrial thinking. Consider the trends that convince farmers to “meet demand”: kale, brussels sprouts, arugula. On the one hand, the rise of “specialty crops” like these may be, on first blush, good news. What happens is that trends take off and every farmer follows suit. What if instead, we — producers and consumers — identify iconic products for each food shed; rally around these products; partner with chefs and others to get these products into production, supply and the popular imagination for eaters of all walks of life to cherish that which differentiates where we live from places others’ live.

DG: How would you describe the current state of biodiversity? What are the key forces that are helping or hurting biodiversity today?

RM: It is difficult to be optimistic when the culture of confinement permeates all stages of the food chain: We are losing biodiversity at an alarming rate. The primary culprit is our devotion to cheap meat. It puts undue pressure on animals, ecosystems and economies. We confine animals, money and palates. We demand that we will can have as much meat as we want, when we want and not consider the hidden costs. Worse, we export this model all over the planet. As a result, places like Para in Brazil enables land speculators to introduce monocrop soybean cultivation on land previously inhabited by small farmers whose integrated farms regenerate soil and economies. Instead, soybeans are raised by large farms, sold to Cargill and transported to Europe for feed to produce Chicken McNuggets. This economic model destroys biodiversity. When we as individuals and institutions opt out of the monocrop economy, we support the ecology of local economies: from farmers markets to school systems that purchase local, fresh and sustainable products.

DG: What’s at stake for our society if biodiversity is reduced? Are there examples where a lack of biodiversity has caused problems within an ecosystem or community?

RM: When we reduce biodiversity, we restrict our society’s ability to be agile. Already, our over-dependence upon corn and a few grains to be part of nearly every meal we consume has gutted rural economies of their wealth, flooded waterways with chemicals and offshore fisheries with “deadzones,” and generations with intolerance to food. Perhaps the most vivid and well-documented example of this over-reliance upon a monocrop economy is the 19th century potato famine in Ireland. When colonialism — neo or old-school — results in a majority of a population consuming only one crop, then people and planet suffer.

DG: What is the scientific and/or business case for a biodiverse food system?

RM: The scientific and business case is the same for biodiversity. Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket. Centralization is bad for economic health. If every farm is growing the same crop and selling to the same customer, then short term competitive decisions outweigh long-term ones. Cost-cutting measures undermine future investment in land and people.

DG: What investments need to be made to create a more biodiverse food system?

RM: For one, let’s stoke eater demands for new flavors by reviving old crops and old breeds by leveraging the behavior change institutions that meet the public where and when they shop: Campaigns in farmers markets, with supportive retailers and via imaginative tourism. At the same time, let’s underwrite farmers to experiment with more diverse varieties of seeds and breeds. For fishers, let’s help them disengage from the commodity corridor of shrimp sold at the dock. Instead, make the most of bycatch, reward quality over quantity.

Second, let’s rethink school lunch as an academic subject. Grow the next generation of good eaters who run towards new and interesting foods because they eat it at school and have a contextual relationship with the foods’ history and geography. And, of course, they love how it tastes. Change the culture of the cafeteria, as if we actually care about the children and to enjoy a future free of chronic diseases. This involves: purchasing endangered seeds and breeds directly from local farmers; ripping out all vestiges of the Fordist cafeteria line that treats children as cogs in a wheel and replacing it with civic lessons that teach children to cooperate and eat family style; and utilizing the power of the public purse to help farmers to shift from growing one commodity and to growing for one school. A tall task? What’s the alternative? This could represent a Marshall Plan for rural America and a cornerstone for a future that rewards innovation, biodiversity and the reinvention of tradition in agriculture.

DG: How might we reinvent capital structures or create incentives to increase investment in biodiversity?

RM: Nearly 95 percent of the Farm Bill invests in a monocrop economy. Get big or get out; takes risks and suffer the consequences. What if instead, we grew the 5 percent of the Farm Bill that rewards farmers to be good stewards of the land, urban consumers to forge ties with rural communities and public health policies that recognize the risks involved with changing eating behaviors. If we liberated rural communities from this culture of confinement, then we could invest in a generation of entrepreneurs who want to return to the land to grow food and dignity and wealth. Change is difficult. Good public policy is like good investment models: They mitigate risk. We should incentivize farmers to develop farms that integrate animals, direct marketing, cooperation with neighboring farmers and long-term land management (in order to diversify the ecology of the land and improve the water and air).

DG: What are some of the most important things food manufacturers, chefs, retailers, farmers, and other key parts of the supply chain can do to support biodiversity?

RM: Champion old varieties of fruits and vegetables, old grains and more meals that use no meat, or at least meat as flavor and not focus of every plate. These steps are huge gifts for farmers seeking guidance as to what to grow and for whom. Consumers can change supply when working closely with farmers. High volume customers speak the loudest, however, it is the small consumer who gets the ball rolling.

DG: Where can consumers and food industry professionals go to learn more about biodiversity issues and what they can do to help?

RM: There are many good resources to turn to. For one, the Slow Food Ark of Taste is a great starting point to stoke excitement about the biodiversity we are losing everyday. However, there’s no substitute for picking up a seed catalogue and spending time with farmers to map out the next season of planting. Can’t find a farmer? Visit your nearby farmers market. Every retailer who’s seeking trends, starts there first to get ahead of the wave.

DG: What are some examples of food products that promote biodiversity?

RM: The proliferation of heirloom tomatoes is one great example of how behavior is changing. Farmers are adapting to meet consumers who crave food that tastes of a place and a particular time. Many heirloom tomatoes are difficult to transport, which alone is an indicator of how limitations and scarcity can reward the farmer who undertakes the risk to change.

DG: If we get to a perfectly biodiverse food system, how would that change the typical selection of products we see in a grocery store?

RM: Travel outside of the USA and you see it already. Stores in Japan stock 80 percent of their shelves with fresh, local and seasonal products. This is not perfection, however, Japanese consumers — of all walks of life — value taste. Stores adapt to that impulse. This is something that is happening in the USA but it’s still small, weak. Farmers market shoppers are walking into grocery stores with a different set of assumptions.

DG: What, if any, exciting products, technologies or services are you seeing that support a more biodiverse food system?

RM: The desire for fermented foods, for one, is widening our sense of what tastes good. No one really saw this coming. Where did it begin? On the margins. Young people become fascinated with gut health, old canning techniques, and flavor. Similarly, the raw milk societies that operate on the margins and in the grey zone are changing expectations about public health, the right to choose, and how the industrial food system is designed to squelch choice.

DG: Are there certain products you would like to see more of in the food industry — either in foodservice or CPG — that would help promote a more biodiverse agricultural system?

RM: There are over 300 products in the USA living catalogue of endangered foods, the Ark of Taste. Some of these are working their way onto dinner tables. A few come to mind that are ripe for rediscovery at commercial levels: The Sebastopol Gravenstein apple, Louisiana satsuma, the Ohio Valley Paw-Paw. However, maybe the question is part of the problem. The Ark of Taste captures the most vulnerable and endangered foods. Few are poised for mass production. More importantly, we need to begin to think beyond mass consumption. We need to relocalize our foods to make them culturally and ecologically appropriate to a region. Maybe we should deploy import substitution thinking at the regional level. What products are currently on the menu that could be substituted with others that are produced locally?

DG: What is your vision for what a more biodiverse food system looks like in 10-15 years?

RM: One in which the kids in today’s schools grow up to raise their families on home-cooked meals from fruits and vegetables raised in backyards and community gardens. If this occurs, it’s because we’ve created a culture that demands more from life: Work less, earn more; spend more time with each other around the table. The pressures families feel today are the very same ones that confine farmers to a monocrop economy.

DG: Anything else you want to share?

RM: A love for cooking and eating. Only when we shed the perception that these are elitist notions will we rediscover that our grandparents were hipsters, that immigrants possess traditional knowledge that will rescue biodiversity from the scientists and economists that wish to subject us to fewer choices and less love for people, planet and parsnips.

Read all of the interviews here and learn more about Biodiversity at The Future Market.

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Richard McCarthy, Executive Director of Slow Food USA

An early innovator in the late-20th Century farmers market renaissance to reconnect urban consumers to rural producers, he founded Market Umbrella in New Orleans, where its flagship Crescent City Farmers Market launched some of the first health incentive programs. After Hurricane Katrina, the Market served as a fulcrum for social, economic and philanthropic reinvention for the region’s food system. Writer, lecturer, and community development specialist, at Slow Food, Richard launches campaigns, stages global gatherings and forge partnerships with expected and nontraditional partners to change the world through food that is good, clean and fair for all.

The post Slow Food’s Database Catalogues Thousands of Endangered Foods appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Source: Supervalu

Every week we track the business, tech and investment trends in CPG, retail, restaurants, agriculture, cooking and health, so you don’t have to. Here are some of this week’s top headlines.

United Natural Foods announced this morning it will acquire Supervalu for $2.9 billion. The development promises to create a one-of-a-kind distributor to service the fast-growth natural and organic channel. Meanwhile, Walmart has just launched a pilot program to allow customers make grocery pickups with the help of an autonomous vehicle.

A week after abruptly shutting operations, Chef’d has been acquired by True Food Innovations, which will suspend its sprawling e-commerce offerings while it works to become profitable by selling the meal kits in stores.

Grubhub is acquiring LevelUp for $390 million cash, allowing it to deepen its integration with restaurants’ point-of-sale systems.

Check out our weekly round-up of last week’s top food startup, tech and innovation news below or peruse the full newsletter here.

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1. UNFI to Acquire Supervalu for $2.9B – Food Dive

The move will expand UNFI’s perishables business and give it access to important new markets.

2. Chef’d Is Back in Business — but Not E-Business – Supermarket News

A week after shutting operations, meal kit company is acquired by True Food Innovations, a fresh food technology, CPG and manufacturing company. True Food will continue to sell its meal kits in grocery stores, but it will suspend its e-commerce offerings while it works to become profitable.

3. Grubhub Acquires Payments and Loyalty Company LevelUp for $390M – TechCrunch

Founder and CEO Matt Maloney stated the acquisition would allow Grubhub to deepen its integration with restaurants’ point-of-sale systems, allowing the company to handle more deliveries.

4. Plant-Based Innovation Burgeoning Beyond Protein – Food Business News

Global product introductions with plant-based claims grew at a compound annual rate of 62% between 2013 and 2017. While meat and dairy alternatives continue to drive new product development, colors, sweeteners and flavors derived from plants are burgeoning.

5. Trump’s USDA Announces $12B in Farmer Relief from His Tariffs. But What Are We Going to Do with All These Soybeans? – New Food Economy

The majority of the subsidies will go to soybean farmers. The direct payments are intended to bridge the gap until new trade partners are found.

6. Walmart to Test Self-Driving Cars for Grocery Pickup Service – NPR

Walmart and Waymo — formerly Google’s self-driving car project — announced on Wednesday the launch of a pilot program that will allow consumers to make their grocery pickups with the help of an autonomous vehicle.

7. Fungi-Based Meat Alternative Startup Raises $4.25M – Food Business News

Funding was led by True Ventures and Collaborative Fund. The company’s first product is a “salmon” burger. It plans to use the new capital to expand its team and develop more sustainable protein products.

8. Grocers Are Failing to Meet $20B Consumer Demand for Local Food – AgFunder

While the demand for local food has never been greater, many grocers are ill-equipped to serve customers who are willing to pay more for quality food that supports their local economy.

9. ACG Closes $350M Fund to Invest in ‘Rising Star’ Brands – Project Nosh

The private equity firm Alliance Consumer Growth previously invested in brands including Way Better Snacks, Krave, Suja and Clio. The firm will maintain its focus on emerging brands in the food, beverage, beauty and restaurant space.

10. JAB Holding to Acquire Insomnia Cookies – Food Business News

Through its Krispy Kreme Doughnut business, JAB Holding is acquiring the New York-based cookie delivery company for an undisclosed sum.

11. Jonathan Gold, Food Critic Who Celebrated L.A.’s Cornucopia, Dies at 57 – New York Times

The restaurant critic whose curious, far-ranging, relentless explorations of his native Los Angeles helped his readers understand dozens of cuisines and helped the city understand itself, died on Saturday.

12. Flash Boys on the Farm? Arms Race Is Unleashed Over Crop Data – Bloomberg

The USDA ended its decades-long policy of giving journalists data first, and instead posting directly on the web. The development is the latest sage for crop markets that have high-speed algorithms taking over slower human counterparts.

13. Trump’s USDA Fights Global Guidelines on Livestock Antibiotics – Bloomberg

The Trump administration is resisting the World Health Organization’s effort to sharply limit antibiotic use in farm animals, a move intended to help preserve the drugs’ effectiveness.

Our newsletter is the absolute easiest way to stay on top of the emerging sector, so sign up for it today and never miss the latest food tech and innovation news and trends, Already signed up? Share the love with your friends and colleagues!

The post UNFI Acquires Supervalu for $2.9B, Chef’d is Back in Biz + More appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

This is a guest post by Scott Marlow, Executive Director of the Rural Advancement Foundation International – USA. Read Food+Tech Connect’s full coverage of the Whole Foods acquisition here. 

Amazon’s announcement of its intent to purchase Whole Foods, if it does in fact progress, needs to be seen in the larger context of consolidation across food retail and agriculture.

In 2016, four grocery chains accounted for 36.9 percent of food and beverages sold in the U.S. Walmart, number one, sold 17.3 percent. Whole Foods came in 9th, selling 1.7 percent and Amazon 21st, with 0.8 percent.

This consolidation includes the organic industry. Food and product brands that appear independent are often, in fact, owned by conglomerates. Annie’s Homegrown, Cascadian Farms and Muir Glen are owned by General Mills. Green Mountain coffee by Coca Cola, Seeds of Change by M&M Mars, and Bear Naked and Morningstar Farms by Kellogg, to name a few.

While local and sustainable foods are seen as an alternative to industrial food products, market forces are the same. When an industry becomes consolidated, people may get cheaper products. But in the drive for corporate profits, that market power is often used to transfer costs and risk onto land, people and animals. A dairyman friend looked at the 7-figure salary of a CEO in the consolidated dairy industry and commented, “That’s my milk check.”  Long-term studies of the poultry industry tracked the erosion of farmer income and security as the number of companies in the farmer’s region decreased.

Whole Foods’ brand was built on people’s demand for food that’s healthier for themselves, their communities and the planet. The growth of local, sustainable and natural foods has delivered these values in three ways: the inherent qualities of the product, like “free from artificial additives”; the effects of how the product was produced, like “dolphin-safe tuna”; and the economic effects of more equitable distribution of benefits, like “fair trade.”

Customers often seek to replicate the multiple benefits they see in buying directly from farmers at a farmers market, where they can look the farmer in the eye and ask how the food was grown and place their food dollar directly into trusted hands.

This trusted relationship has a great deal of value in the marketplace, even as the connection has gotten more tenuous. The entire sustainable food industry has built much of its business on the value of connections to a farmer. Notice the pictures of producers featured prominently throughout many grocery stores, including Whole Foods. Airport shop fronts labeled “The Farmers Market” sell bottled soft drinks and processed snacks, few of which resemble anything from a farm. The third largest American poultry integrator is called Perdue Farms, despite contracting out all of the actual farming. But does the farmer actually profit in this market?

The relationship-based integrity of the farmers market erodes as the supply chain lengthens. The terms “local,” “natural” and “sustainable,” used widely on a range of products, are essentially meaningless as a market label. None has a definition, standards or any form of certification. With huge capacity for tracking consumers’ purchase patterns, Amazon has the power to market to consumer demand for food delivering environmental, social and economic benefits with few or none of the costs associated with actually providing those benefits.

Grocery consolidation increases the critical importance of label terms that have integrity, like “organic.” Recent examples of organic standards violations in the media show there is at least a standard to be violated, and that there are processes for addressing those violations. Consumers can have more confidence in the term “organic” at Walmart, than “natural” or “sustainable,” even at Whole Foods. While not perfect, the organic label provides the model for consumer confidence in marketplace claims of virtue. Without clear standards and certification, this value is lost.

Whole Foods has been a promoter of the use of organic and other standards, including developing its own. A major concern will be the commitment of an Amazon-owned Whole Foods to the integrity of all of these standards, and the extent to which industry consolidation could erode confidence and clarity for people who want to buy products that reflect their values.

When we boil it down, industry consolidation can provide increased efficiencies, but significant reduction in competition. This includes competition for the products that farmers produce and the value the farmer’s identity provides. When farmers have fewer opportunities to connect to consumers, they have less ability to set prices that reflect their true costs and the value that they add. Consumers must be even more vigilant that their purchases truly provide the benefits they seek.

The brand dissonance driving the attention to the purchase of Whole Foods by Amazon is the difference between the two companies’ reputations for their treatment of local farms and businesses, not the products offered. This potential sale is no different from the consolidation of many other sectors of food and retail. Over time, we will see if investment in the long-term value of providing true benefits to the farmer, the consumer and the planet will outweigh the short-term drive for profit.

So far, that record is not good.

Read Food+Tech Connect’s full coverage of the Whole Foods acquisition here. 

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Scott Marlow is the Executive Director of the Rural Advancement Foundation International – USA, a non-profit organization based in Pittsboro, NC. Scott previously directed RAFI’s Farm Sustainability program, providing in-depth financial counseling to farmers in crisis, education on disaster assistance programs and access to credit, and addressing the needs of mid-scale farmers who are increasing the sustainability of their farms by transitioning to higher-value specialty markets. Scott’s specialty is financial infrastructure, including access to credit and risk management, and how that infrastructure addresses food security and global climate change. He has served on the steering committee of the National Task Force to Renew Agriculture of the Middle, the Organization Council of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, the Board of the Southern Sustainable Agriculture Working Group, the Board of the NC Farm Transition Network, and the NC Agricultural Advancement Consortium and serves on the Advisory Committee of the NC Agricultural Development and Farmland Preservation Trust Fund. He has a Masters Degree in Crop Science from NC State University, and a BA in Political Science from Duke University.

The post Valuing Farmers in the Whole Foods Acquisition appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Every week we track the business, tech and investment trends in CPG, retail, restaurants, agriculture, cooking and health, so you don’t have to. In last week’s top news, Ben Epstein, founder and partner of hardware venture fund Bolt, wrote the best analysis of Juicero we’ve read. He literally took apart Juicero’s hardware and broke down where the startup may have misdirected spending and energy.  In other CPG news, after discovering that a Dollar Tree shopper registered their darling vegan brand Just as a generic budget brand, Hampton Creek has hired a designer to lead a multiyear redevelopment of the Just label, starting with the packaging. And as the demand for local food continues to increase, supermarkets are struggling to keep up.

Check out our weekly round-up of last week’s top food startup, tech and innovation news below or peruse the full newsletter here.

Our newsletter is the absolute easiest way to stay on top of the emerging sector, so sign up for it today and never miss the latest food tech and innovation news and trends, Already signed up? Share the love with your friends and colleagues!

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1. Here’s Why Juicero’s Press is So Expensive – Ben Einstein

Bolt General Partner Ben Einstein breaks down where Juicero went wrong in building its unnecessarily complex machinery and supply chain. He argues that the company wasted tens of millions of dollars on product development prior to shipping a single unit, a cautionary tale for any hardware startup.

Juicero raised nearly $120M from well-known investors before shipping a single unit. The team spent over two years building an incredibly complex product and the ecosystem to support it.

2. Millennial Food Innovators: Fruiti-Cycle Takes on Post-Harvest Losses

Fruiti-Cycle, an electric motorized tricycle equipped with a refrigerated storage unit, is designed to reduce the significant waste that occurs in post-harvest handling in Uganda

3. Artisanal Branding Grows Up – Co. Design

In order to better attract customers at lower-cost retailers such as Walmart, Hampton Creek has hired a designer to lead a multiyear redevelopment of its Just brand, starting with the packaging.

4. Growing Pains: Why Supermarkets are Struggling to Source Local Products – FoodDIVE

Consumer demand for locally grown food has surged at supermarkets, but small farms require further investment to meet demands of grocers and breaking down distribution systems has proven difficult for supermarkets.

5. The Demand for ‘Local’ Food is Growing — Here’s Why Investors Should Pay Attention – Business Insider

If nutrition labels were designed to visualize ingredient proportions, it would likely be easier to avoid sugary foods. An ad campaign from a German consumer interest group shows how much sugar is used in foods like Nutella.

6. Millennials Drive the Better-For-You Snacking Trend – FoodDive

Studies show that two-thirds of millennials surveyed prefer snacks with fewer ingredients and 79 percent will choose snacks with ingredients they recognize.

7. How Gut Bacteria Tell Their Hosts What to Eat – Scientific American

Neuroscientists have found specific types of gut flora help a host animal detect which nutrients are missing in food and then assess how much of those nutrients the host really need to eat.

8. Forget the Food Delivery Startups — People Love Ordering From Grubhub – Quartz

Two years ago, Grubhub’s stock was in free fall, as investors who feared disruption from the many food-delivery startups fled. Today, Grubuhub’s stock is outperforming expectations and its number of active diners increased 26 percent in the last year.

9. This Startup Has a Natural Solution to the $2.6T Food Waste Problem – Fortune

Apeel Sciences’ edible packaging, which is made from uneaten plant material that can be applied to the outside of produce, can double to quadruple the shelf life of produce.

10. Big Name Food Brands Lose Battle of the Grocery Aisle – The Wall Street Journal

Instead of promoting packaged goods from brands like Kraft Heinz Co. and Kellogg, supermarkets are giving better play to fresh food, prepared hot meals, and items from local upstarts.

Our newsletter is the absolute easiest way to stay on top of the emerging sector, so sign up for it today and never miss the latest food tech and innovation news and trends, Already signed up? Share the love with your friends and colleagues!

The post Where Juicero Went Wrong, Hampton Creek Gets a Makeover + More Top News appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

In tandem with the launch of the Food+Tech Job Board, we are thrilled to launch the Food Startup Growth Series. This series will give you an inside look at the strategies, challenges and best practices of fast-growing food startups.

Meet Patrick Mateer and Alex Piasecki, CEO and CFO respectively of Seal the Seasons, a North Carolina-based startup that believes our food system should provide health and wealth for all. Seal the Seasons partners with local farms to freeze, market and distribute the best quality fruits and vegetables.  The produce is then sold at stores providing consumers with high-quality sustainable produce available year-round. Seal the Seasons provides farmers with a living wage and improves access to nutritious food. It also donates 20 percent of its profits to organizations working to end hunger.

While the company now operates only in North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida and Georgia, the short-term goal is to expand to New England and New York with the expectation that they will eventually scale local models across the country. Seal the Seasons is in the process of hiring key marketing and sales positions over the next 12 months to drive growth and deliver local produce to consumers beyond North Carolina. In 2016, Seal the Seasons closed an undisclosed seed round and grew from selling produce in seven local stores to over 500 across the state. It was also recently accepted into the FoodFutureCo accelerator program.

I spoke with Patrick and Alex about their strategy for scaling-up, their company culture, and why they think it’s an exciting time to be part of the food innovation market.

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Danielle Gould: What’s keeping your team busy right now?

Patrick Mateer & Alex Piasecki: Seal the Seasons is operating on all cylinders during the growing and harvest season. We’re currently focused on three areas to scale our business. Our operations team is focused on working with our co-packing partners and sourcing our delicious berries to be frozen. Our strategic team is working with the sales team to pitch new accounts and expand our number of doors and facings. Finally, our marketing team is deep in a re-brand. We’re redesigning our packaging to better match our company, story and mission to our visual identity.  

DG: What are your growth goals for the next 12-24 months, and how do you plan to achieve those goals?

PM & AP: We have a colossal mission: to make local produce available year-round for everyone. We take “everyone” seriously–which requires an ambitious but focused geographic growth plan to scale Seal the Seasons local model across the country. Our goal for the next 12-24 months is to make local produce available outside of North Carolina. We’re launching Georgia Grown and Florida Grown local products across the Southeast this summer. Be on the lookout for Seal the Seasons to come to a new store near you!

DG: What does your company culture look like, and how have you developed that culture?

PM & AP: Seal the Seasons is a family that shares a passion for local food and transparent supply chains. Our company culture is to say yes, tell it how it is, and collaborate together to take action. We keep it real in the office and always keep the final objective in sight while supporting each other in our pursuit of company milestones. We like to ask questions of each other to test basic assumptions and we’re always thinking about redundancy.

DG: How are you preserving your company culture as you scale up?

PM & AP: Seal the Seasons has a no bulls#*t attitude, but we love to have fun. We preserve our culture by living it and by keeping each other honest and accountable. New employees are often surprised about how we share problems throughout the team and practice a higher level of internal transparency than most early-stage businesses. Our teammates are our biggest motivators and the most important part of our support network. To unwind, we love to do team lunches and after-work drinks to stay up to date on each other’s lives, ranging from new family additions (congrats Bryan!) and to our founder’s love life.

DG: What do you know now that you wish you would have known when you started scaling your company? What are the biggest challenges and lessons learned as you’ve grown your company?

PM & AP:  As a first-time entrepreneur, I work with a lot of mentors and advisers. We have incredible gratitude for their time and support, but when starting a business, we initially found processing some of their passionate viewpoints to be conflicting. Mentor whiplash can be challenging to deal with. I’ve learned to trust my instinct and always come back to our core brand mission when mentors give difficult or conflicting advice. Mentors are critical, but entrepreneurs must remember success comes from innovation and risk-taking, not from following the traditional path.

DG: What will someone who works for you be able to add to their resume?

PM & AP: When you’re doing something no one has ever done before, you have to be creative and comfortable with the risk to execute effectively. As a startup, working like MacGyver is key. Anyone that works at Seal the Seasons can add bootstrapping/creativity, risk-taking and self-management to their resume. We are the opposite of micromanagers and require people that can own their objectives, postulate solutions, then implement and execute.  Our team works with limited resources and we expect focused results.

DG: What job(s) are you hiring for, and how will those positions help drive growth in your company?

PM & AP: We will be hiring several marketing and sales positions over the next twelve months. Watch Food + Tech Job Board to see all our positions as they open! These positions will be with retail grocers, foodservice, data analytics, social marketing, and PR/field marketing. Sales and marketing drive growth; we’ll be looking for hires that are at the top of their sector and have success working at scale.

DG: What kind of training do you offer for new employees who may be switching from other industries or who are just out of school?

PM & AP: Beyond onboarding new employees to our systems and company HR policies, we train our employees on a project-by-project basis to get them to work quickly. We only hire employees out of the industry or with transferable skills so you should feel at home in week one. Local food should be a passion before you apply.

DG: What’s your favorite interview question?

PM & AP: Why are you coming to work at a risky startup where payroll isn’t guaranteed, when you could have a higher paying job with greater security and more benefits at an established company?

DG: Why do you think it’s exciting to be working in food right now?

PM & AP: Food is a rapidly changing environment in the 21st century. Consumers are shopping differently, spending over $12 billion in local farmers markets, forcing conventional grocers to transform the physical layout of stores and emphasize the “farm-to-table” movement. Legacy brands are struggling to react and stay relevant; launching new products like pumpkin spice Cheerios isn’t going to solve the modern consumer’s needs.

Innovation in grocery is especially relevant in the frozen aisle. Legacy CPG has left significant whitespace in the category, allowing brands like Yasso, Luvo, or Evol to capture market share. The journey of Seal the Seasons experience is no different. Our localized supply chain business model gives us a distinct advantage over the rest of the category, allowing us to deliver new consumer benefits at a competitive price. Our team loves to see new buyer reaction to our product and receive consumer emails about their positive product experience. The most exciting part of our job is working with all the farmers and the consumers that make it possible for local food to nourish its local community.

Check out exciting food tech, design, management, operations, development and food science positions at Food+Tech Jobs.

The post Seal The Seasons Aims to Expand its Farm-to-Freezer Model Across the Country appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Dishes that promote more sustainable food systems: (clockwise from upper left) Bone marrow & parsley salad, St. John; beet infused asian carp, Miya’s; carrot tartare, Eleven Madison Park; rotation risotto, Blue Hill.

In the recent history of fine dining, there have been a handful of notable dishes that transcend the table and make a statement about how our food system should operate. To name a few:

• Nose-to-Tail, Circa 1994: Chef Fergus Henderson, of St. John in London, opens his restaurant and becomes a vocal proponent of nose-to-tail eating. He turns bone marrow into a luxury dish and delights farmers and butchers everywhere by getting the public to celebrate more parts of the animal, reducing food waste and bringing additional income to those who make meat.
• Invasavorism, c.2010: Chef Bun Lai, of Miya’s Sushi in New Haven, Connecticut, starts serving invasive species — like Lionfish, Asian Carp, and Knotweed — on his menu as a way to use aquatic bycatch and to strengthen the local food system.
• Plant “Proteins”, c.2012: Chef Daniel Humm, of Eleven Madison Park in New York City, mesmerizes diners with a beef-tartare-inspired dish entirely made from carrots. The dish is served tableside with your server grinding whole carrots through a meat grinder.
• Rotational Dining, c.2013: Chef Dan Barber, of Blue Hill in New York, creates his seminal, “Rotation Risotto” dish. A mix of “soil-supporting grains and legumes, cooked and presented in the manner of a classic risotto,” it’s a delicious plate that reinforces rotational agriculture that’s better for the soil.

All of these chefs have used their platforms as restaurateurs and influencers to promote mindful deliciousness. For those lucky enough to have been to these restaurants, the ability to dine on something so pleasurable while supporting sustainability feels like you’re getting away with something.

But we (eaters, cooks, farmers, food makers, food media, etc.) can’t let the kind of food you see at those restaurants start and end there. For every cupcake, avocado toast or cronut that catches on like wildfire, we need more dishes that feature offal, bycatch, plant based foods and rotation crops to also dominate menus everywhere.

The above examples are dishes that only a tiny fraction of the world can experience. In their current form, they may never scale beyond the small group they were designed for. It’s great that these chefs have a media platform to talk about the ideas underlying these dishes, but the food system by-and-large doesn’t feed people like this. Outside of major metro areas there are many who have never heard of these chefs and their ideas.

How might we democratize the most high-minded food ideals practiced in Michelin starred kitchens so that everyone can have them? I’m not talking about lobes of foie gras topped with quenelles of caviar, but dishes like Rotation Risotto, which promotes rotational agriculture and biodiversity.

How do we get someone like General Mills to put Rotation Risotto in every Wal-Mart? How do we get Tyson to make offal a billion dollar consumer product? How do we get Red Lobster to serve bycatch? How do we get McDonald’s to put a veggie burger on the menu in America?

We at the Future Market explored this question with our Crop Crisp prototype product. With Crop Crisps, a mass-market cracker was made in four flavors where each flavor was based on a crop in a four-crop wheat rotation.

Crop Crisps are the CPG version of the Rotation Risotto, in cracker form. While our limited edition run was handmade in Brooklyn, the design of the box suggests a mass produced product similar to what you see in a Wal-Mart or Costco. We did this intentionally because we wanted to show what it would look like when progressive ideas make it into the mainstream, like how a Gucci sweater can eventually trickle down to the Gap.

Crop Crisps: a Future Market concept product. Each cracker flavor is based on a different crop from the same four-crop rotational planting.

Great new dishes with the power to shift the food system will always emerge from places like Blue Hill and Eleven Madison Park. But to truly shift the food system we have to move these ideas to the masses.

Everyday eaters can help these dishes make the jump into the mainstream. How? Next time you’re at a butcher shop, ask for an “off” cut of meat. Any butcher worth their salt will eagerly talk you through how to prepare it. Next time you’re eating something with a great story like Rotation Risotto, share the story on your social networks, not just a FOMO-inducing beauty shot.

It may sound like a series of small actions, but remember that the cupcake, avocado toast and cronut all caught on after a steadily growing stream of social posts. These trends tend to go viral once an editor at Food & Wine decides to write about why their Instagram feed is covered in avocado toast, but it all starts with the people making noise.

We as eaters have the power to decide what the next food trends are. Isn’t it time we start promoting more trends that can impact the food system?

This is also posted at The Future Market.

The post Good Food, Trickling Down appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Startups in the food industry, and the food tech sector in particular, have seen quite a bit of turmoil over the past year. Prominent, well-funded companies like Good Eggs, Kitchensurfing, Dinner Lab and most recently Farmigo have either shuttered altogether or significantly scaled back their operations. As a food tech entrepreneur and advisor to other growing food companies, I am often asked: Is the food sector unwinnable?

I don’t believe so. The food industry is an old school behemoth that desperately needs innovation to feed our exploding population in a world of dwindling resources, as well as to help people eat the real, nutritious meals they crave even when their busy schedules don’t allow it. Innovation is not easy, but it’s possible. Problems arise when startups view the food industry like any other industry ripe for disruption, without fully appreciating the unique challenges it poses, particularly around logistics and customer acquisition.

The Food Distribution Logistics Challenge

The biggest problem startups consistently face is logistics. Food is a physical and perishable product, and our current system is built to move large amounts of it across the globe. For startups working on a local or regional level, or that necessarily begin with small food volumes, distribution often requires more capital than anticipated. Even marketplaces fundamentally depend on a transaction that moves food from point A to point B; if this distribution system is not efficient and economical, they have a hard time scaling rapidly.

Logistics challenges are not insurmountable with honest self-reflection and the right strategy. Traditional food distribution companies have been warehousing and successfully moving perishable goods for decades. UPS and FedEx have mastered far-ranging and inexpensive distribution systems for all other products. The knowledge of logistics exists; the key for any food startup is to understand whether it is a logistics company at its core (hint: it probably is), and then to bring on partners and employees early who possess the necessary expertise to build a logistics company. Those experts can figure out ways to work within the system to get new innovations off the ground.

The Customer Acquisition Challenge

The other unique factor for food startups is how multifaceted our relationship is to the food we purchase and consume. On the one hand, food is deeply tied to our culture and traditions, identity and social interactions, and our comfort and enjoyment. Quality and stories matter. On the other hand, thanks to last century’s modernization of our food system, we are now accustomed to having food be fast, cheap and consistent, not to mention always available. Any company entering the food industry must perform a balancing act between these two extremes, which is a tough mandate. Further complicating things, food purchases are most often decisions made out of habit and within a consumer’s comfort zone, which why consumer adoption of new food technologies and products tends to be slow.

To combat this slow adoption, many food startups fall prey to the land grab mentality of enticing as many consumers as possible through heavy discounting. This leads to overly high customer acquisition costs and negative gross margins, which are impossible to sustain in the long run. It also creates a temptation for the consumer to jump from competitor to competitor without forming an emotional or habitual connection with any of them. Rather than focusing on amassing as many customers as possible in the shortest time frame, food startups, in particular, need to focus on turning their customers into repeat users. One way to do this might be to focus on a constrained region where the company can tap into a community’s particular traditions and connections. Growth may be slower, but it will be stickier and more profitable in the short run.

Changing The Food System Takes Time

Ultimately, everything boils down to speed: changing the food system is going to be a long, slow process. This reality tends to be at odds with the current funding atmosphere and venture capital in particular. The “move fast and break things” mantra doesn’t work in food. Achieving sky high returns within a fund’s typical horizon of 5 to 10 years is near impossible when you’re dealing with food.

To any entrepreneur considering a food startup, I would pose two questions. First, are you providing a product or service that answers a real need for consumers without fully upsetting their emotional relationship to food? Second, are you and your investors prepared for the long haul both mentally and financially? The startup that answers yes to both of those questions has a good shot at not only disrupting food, but sticking around to reap the rewards.

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Jennifer Goggin has been an entrepreneur and advisor in the food-tech space since 2011 when she co-founded FarmersWeb to help farms, food hubs and food artisans streamline wholesale orders, deliveries and payments online. Prior to FarmersWeb, Jennifer was Director of Operations at Basis Farm to Chef, a local food distributor in New York. She has been a featured panelist and moderator for conferences on entrepreneurship and the food technology industry, as well as a guest columnist for Food+Tech Connect and Huffington Post Food. Jennifer is a board member of Slow Food NYC where she works on its Snail of Approval committee to recognize restaurants, bars, and markets that contribute to the quality, authenticity and sustainability of the New York City food supply.

The post Is Food Unwinnable for Startups? appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Like many of you, I was shocked to learn Brooklyn-based Farmigo was shutting down its online farmers market last week. In a blog post, CEO Benzi Ronen said the company could no longer continue its delivery service sustainably, so its engineers would be returning to Farmigo’s roots and focusing on its community supported agriculture (CSA) software platform.

It was surprising because the abrupt announcement came less than a year after Farmigo had raised $16M ($26 million in total). I had also just heard co-founder Benzi Ronen confidently claim that Farmigo’s software and community-focused distribution model would replace supermarkets this past May at the Future Food Tech Conference. And Ronen just wrote a piece for Food+Tech Connect, which highlighted many of the successes the company was having.

What happened? Earlier this week, Ronen and angel investor Ali Partovi, an early investor in Farmigo, spoke candidly with me about why Farmigo shut down its online farmers market, lessons learned and what’s next.

Is The Farm-to-Consumer Food Delivery Model Inherently Flawed?

Following Good Eggs’, another leading online farmers market, pull back of its operations in three cities last summer, my big question is: Is the farm-to-consumer delivery model inherently flawed, or have we just not found the right model yet?

Partovi believes it’s the latter. “Silicon Valley is sometimes guilty of hubris, thinking we can disrupt an industry overnight and do it better,” he says. “Sometimes we fail, but we keep trying and eventually we do succeed. I do believe the food industry is going to be made much more efficient, including farm-to-fork food delivery. I just think there’s a pull back happening, but I do think it’s not going to happen in the long run.”

Similarly, Ronen is convinced someone is going to upend the industry. In fact, Farmigo was actually nearing break-even and was profitable on a gross margin basis, according to Ronen. The decision to shutter the service was not for lack of market or feasibility, but rather because he and co-founder Yossi Pik felt that as software founders they were not best positioned to solve the increasingly complicated logistics required to meet evolving consumer delivery needs.

“We think we’re great at building software to solve problems, but we don’t think we’re great at building logistics to solve problems,” explains Ronen. “When you look at what the consumer is starting to want and where the environment is taking consumers, as far as how they want to consume better food and the skills you need in order to deliver on that, we started to see that we are no longer overlapping with where we needed to be.”

Consumer Shopping Needs Are Changing Fast

As companies like Amazon, Instacart and Fresh Direct begin offering 1-2 hour on-demand delivery, eaters are increasingly coming to expect this as the norm. This shift in is something that would have been difficult for Farmigo to predict even a year ago, says Ronen.

Therein lay Farmigo’s major challenge: its just-in-time, pick-up model was fundamentally at odds with on-demand or even next-day delivery.

With Farmigo’s community-centered food distribution model, people would place an order online, which farmers would then harvest and ship to Farmigo’s warehouse. Farmigo would then distribute the products to community organizers who would manage pick-up locations for local residents. By not holding inventory and removing last mile delivery to individual homes, Farmigo was able reduce costs and simplify logistics, but this approach also meant it took a couple of days for you to get your order.

The infrastructure Farmigo would need to support on-demand or even next day delivery is dramatically different than the system it had been working to perfect for the last 6 years.

After raising $26 million and building a community of employees, producers and customers that depend on you, its a difficult decision to walk away from your business, but Ronen and Pik knew this was not the right path forward for them.

Sustainable Food is Hard to Scale, No Matter How Much Capital You Have

Most venture capitalists are looking for high growth companies, so when you bring on capital your inclination is to grow fast and scale. As I wrote about when Good Eggs pulled back its operations, while it may be easy to scale software, many founders and investors don’t realize just how difficult it is to scale the distribution of perishable goods and brick and mortar infrastructure.

In some ways, Partovi thinks Farmigo and other companies that have had to pull-back operations did not have much of a choice. “There’s a combination of feeling seduced by the euphoria of other people doing more aggressive things,” he explains, “but also a legitimate eagerness to change and improve the food system faster.” There is also competitive pressure. If you’re not as aggressive as your competitors,  you risk being cannibalized and becoming irrelevant.

Partovi says he has always been impressed with how thoughtful Farmigo has been with the money they’ve taken. “When they did begin doing more on the consumer food delivery side it wasn’t nearly as aggressive a roll out as it could have been, “ he says. “It was relatively measured and careful, and I think they are in a better position to land on their feet.” He’s confident Farmigo will be just fine, because it still has its CSA software business, which has 300 to 400 customers, depending upon the season, and revenue.

What’s Next for Farmigo?

For now, Farmigo’s engineering team will focus on what they do best: software. Leveraging the deep understanding of farmers needs they’ve cultivated over the years, they hope to build a platform that enables farmers to best utilize the growing number of sales channels available to them.

What This Means for Investors & Startups

Farmigo’s shuttering of its delivery service is sure to make investors more cautious, but it shouldn’t deter them from investing in this space. And just because it may be more difficult to raise capital, it shouldn’t deter startups from launching new companies in this space. Savvy investors and entrepreneurs will recognize that grocery is a huge market with a massive opportunity to boost farmer’s profits and make it easier for them to get their products to eaters.

BUT this is a technology-enabled logistics business that is not for the faint of heart. Let me repeat: it’s a logistics business that is enabled by technology, not the other way around. Both Farmigo and Good Eggs took a software first approach.

Below is my full interview with Ronen, which has been edited slightly for clarity.

We will be digging deeper into the e-commerce space over the next couple of weeks, so sign up here to get notified when we publish more interviews and here if you’re interested in being featured.

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Danielle Gould:  What happened with Farmigo?

Benzi Ronen:  We were at a juncture where we were about to raise another round, and these are the junctures where, as an entrepreneur, you have to ask yourself: Is this what I want to commit to for the next three to five years of my life? Is this the direction I believe is going to get the most leverage out of my time personally as a founder and what I could be doing? Is this going to be worthy of the amount of money that we’re raising from investors and able to give them a return on investment? Is it what the company can best do given the space and the environment?

We decided that continuing down the path we were on was not right for us. There’s definitely a passionate group of customers that want this kind of a service, but when we thought about what’s going to make the experience better for consumers, the answers we came up with were not improvements in the software and technology, they were improvements in the logistics platform. When I say logistics platform, I mean hardcore logistics, like how do we get the food to you faster? How do we reduce the order window from three days, since we had a just in time model where everything was pre-bought and farmers would harvest and deliver your orders to our warehouse, so when you place your order we give it to the farmers they would harvest it they bring it to the warehouse? How do we give you multiple orders a week? How do we enable home delivery from the pickup site to your home?

Basically, the product was the food, its quality and its transparency to farmers, and all the enhancements we saw in the years to come were around how to make the convenience of getting that food better and how to bring down prices. The answers [to how we would do this] were around getting more savvy at the logistics, while simultaneously continuing to improve our margins, which were also primarily driven by getting better at logistics, and then doing it well enough so we could expand into multiple regions, which is also how can we replicate those logistics. As software founders, we realized this wasn’t playing into our core competency, and so it was difficult for us to legitimize our expertise as being the best positioned to continue down our current roadmap.

DG:  When you launched the company, you must have realized this was a software and logistics business. How did your investors respond to your decision?

BR:  It was. I always called it a three legged stool: part software, part logistics and part this organizer model we had. The organizer model was Farmigo’s unique perspective on this industry. [We didn’t just want] to do home delivery like everybody else. What we had learned from the community supported agriculture (CSA) model was that pickup sites can be a very efficient way to distribute food and that finding someone in the community to take on this organizer role was leaning into a distributed model [that also gets] the consumer to play an active role.

Those are the three legs of the company, and we felt they were pretty evenly balanced. Software was enabling the customer to order, the organizer to manage their pickup sites and the warehouses to operate more efficiently. Obviously, we also had the logistics and our ability to recruit organizers, train them, launch them, manage a community of organizers. We felt it was pretty evenly balanced. And it was to date, but when we looked going forward, we really felt that most of the innovation would have to be on the logistics front and so the stool would be lopsided.

DG:  How did your investors respond to your decision?

BR:  It’s not like it happened in one day. We had a few different options of how to raise the next round and those options triggered a lot of different conversations. It’s not that all the investors looked at it the same way. Everybody had very different perspectives based on the funds they come from, the lifecycle of where the fund is, what they’re trying to get out of it, what kind of bets they want to make, how much more money they’re willing to put in. So it was a journey that we went [through] with them as well.

It’s not like I had figured all this out five months ago. You’re on the fundraising treadmill, and you’re running so quickly that you don’t have much time to stop and think. Victory is just closing a round of funding, so you can get the money and keep doing what you’ve been doing.

It took some time for me to finally say:  Wait a minute. I actually want to take a week or two with my co-founder before we close a round and not think about how I pitch and close the next round, but really do little bit more soul searching to figure out what we believe in and what we think we can pull off in a meaningful way. When I reached the decision and shared it with our investors, they were pretty much all understanding and supportive.

DG: That must have been really difficult to take a step back and reflect. How do you think you were able to do that?

BR:  I think when the funding is relatively easy – it’s never easy, but in all my previous rounds I had my pitch, the pitch never really changed and it’s a matter of kissing enough frogs until you find the right partner that you’re going to move forward with. Then you move forward with them and start executing the plan you just sold to them.

What happened in this case was we got an offer that made us pause and say: We just sold this plan, are we honestly ready to move forward with this plan? Is this the right plan? Are we sure about it? It was the type of investor we knew would take the plan very literally, and so that was question mark number one. So that made me take the plan back and revise it a bit, but I was still in the mindset of that I knew exactly where I was heading.

The second time that made me pause, [it made me think]: wait a minute before I put down another plan or proposal let me make sure that this resonates with my inner sense, and [I’m] not just [doing this] to win. As an entrepreneur, you get into this cycle where you just want to win. Losing is not an option. It’s very difficult to stop and say: I might not be on a winning path.

If you follow some of the conversations around knowing when to pivot and when not to pivot, it’s a really interesting debate. You can’t play out two different paths, so a lot of companies might be pivoting early, and they just didn’t have the wherewithal to play it out, to find out whether that would have been a successful path.

How do you know whether you’re pivoting too early? How do you know whether you’re pivoting too late? That maybe you’re just a stubborn entrepreneur that’s banging his head against the wall, and it’s never going to work. If you would just be a little bit more open minded and shift direction, then you might be on a much better path.

Jim Collins, author of Good To Great, has what he calls the hedgehog strategy. There’s three concentric circles: one circle is what are you passionate about, another circle is what are you best at and the other circle is the economic engine, the environment and what there’s demand for. Unless you’re working on something that meets all three, then something is wrong.

Am I passionate about the food system and fixing the food system? Do I love what I’ve been doing for the last eight years and Farmigo? The mission we set? Yes, I love it all.

Is there a need for what we’ve been working on? There is definitely a need for it – you can debate, I think, the magnitude of the need. How many customers are willing to pay a premium for a better product? There are certainly the die hard early adopters out there, and that’s who we were hitting. I think there’s another question which is: there’s no question people want better food if you can give it to them at the same prices, for sure, but that’s hard to do in the local food system today.

As Amazon starts to set a new standard, just like they did with free shipping in a day and now everybody has to get free shipping, and now it’s same day [food] delivery that they will do within two hours to your doorstep through a Prime Membership. Is that going to become the new standard? Maybe, and then people won’t want to compromise on that either. There’s the demand side of things, and that’s something we were dealing with and it’s not going to change overnight. But I think you need to get ready for [the demand side of things to change] and that’s part of where better logistics acumen comes into play.

Then it’s what are you great at? We think we’re great at building software to solve problems, but we don’t think we’re great at building logistics to solve problems. When you look at what the consumer is starting to want and where the environment is taking the consumers, as far as how they want to consume better food and the skills you need in order to deliver on that, we started to see that we are no longer overlapping with where we needed to be. And that’s a scary insight to come up with, especially when you’re knee deep into it. I don’t think it was an insight we could have come up with even a year ago.It’s just things were not heading in that direction.

We’ve built an incredible software platform that powers our warehouse – that’s what we’ve been building over the last year, as well as the supply chain that connects the farmers, consumers and organizers. That’s what we told our investors a year ago, and that’s what we built. But it was definitely scary. I mean it’s like holy shit.

DG:  From a logistics perspective, do you think the distributed organizer model made the logistics more challenging?

BR:  No, it simplified it for us. We had a huge competitive advantage on cost and logistics because we organize our customers into these pods. Think about Fresh Direct: if you and I live close to one another and you order your stuff to be delivered at 10 am and I order my stuff to be delivered at 11 am, we’re on completely different routes, even though from density perspective we’re neighbors. What we did is the organizer became a buffer so that we could deliver 20 orders to one location and then people could pick up at different times from that organizer. We even started to experiment with delivering out from the organizer to their home.

DG:  Can you share a number for how much of a competitive advantage it gave you? How much did it improve your margins?

BR:  It’s all comparative to each company. We were doing those benchmarks, but it’s going to be different for each one and it’s awfully different per city. To deliver in Manhattan, Fresh Direct actually has some advantages. You can almost see them doing that star in Manhattan where they’ll park the truck and then they’ll have runners go out from the truck, and so they’re actually doing the equivalent of a pick up location spot. But then you’ve got to Seattle and that model will never work, and that’s why Fresh Direct hasn’t been able to pull out of New York Metro.

DG: So that’s what worked with the model. What do you think didn’t work?

BR: I think anything that is logistics heavy takes time to figure out. We were getting much better at becoming profitable on a gross margin basis, but that takes work. It’s not like an investment in [pure] software, and then you start to see it payoff the more customers you have [as] you amortize your software investment across multiple customers.

It’s like every day you get just a little bit better packaging and the materials. You find another vendor and you get better at packing, so you can get more stuff [packed] into the materials you have.

Then you have labor and how do you give them the tools that they need in order to work effectively? How do you motivate them? How do you train them? What is the right balance between the hourly workers that were full timers for us and the contract labor we had to bring on during peak pack periods? How do you get better at your routing? We were outsourcing our deliveries to different vendors or independent drivers in each region, so how do you figure that out? Even the size of the vehicles changes.

I’ve just touched the tip of the iceberg. The level of complexity and iterations that you have, and then you mess up on one thing like throughput in the warehouse, and you just messed up all your routes. It’s a constant refinement, and it takes a certain type of person who’s really good at that and who can over time to continuously make improvements there. We have a wonderful VP of operations, best ever.

It’s not like I don’t think it’s possible. I thought it was possible. We were getting much better. What we were able to do even in the last half year is phenomenal. We were getting to a break even point. On a gross margin basis we were profitable. On a fully loaded gross margin basis – when you take into account customer support, sales, salaries, everything that is variable that’s needed company-wide to produce an order – we were kind of just getting to break-even, which was monumental. But we thought forward how we can make it even better, it just again comes back to: Is that what I am great at? No.

DG: What will it take to tackle these logistics, as far as talent and capital?

BR:  I think it depends what your appetite is. If you look at Winder Farms  and Farm Fresh To You, they’ve been doing this for about 20 years, actually Winder raised some money. If you started a small logistics operation and iterate around that, that’s one way to do it. If you want to move faster, a la Good Eggs , then you need to make some bets and you need to bring in an expert that you’re not breeding in-house, but you’re actually buying that expertise. There are different routes to get there. I don’t think there is any one way.

DG:  What about scale. Do you feel like you scaled Farmigo at the right time or was it premature?

BR:  We were a lot slower than, let’s say, Good Eggs. They immediately went into four markets. We were in New York forever (expanded to New Jersey, but that was out of the same warehouse), and then we went to San Francisco. Seattle we launched in October, because already investors were saying we’re not sure you know how to replicate the model. So did we grow too quickly? I don’t know.

We wanted to see if the organizer model could take root in other markets. That was a big proof point we needed to show investors in order to raise more money. So we had to prove that, and we couldn’t just stay in core markets, which were the Bay Area and New York. If it was a self-funded business, would I have leaned over that way? No.

DG:  What will happen to all of the producers who were selling through Farmigo?

BR:  Summer has historically been Farmigo’s seasonal low. Our school sites shut down and folks go on vacation. So our producers knew not to count on us for the Summer. Most of them make up for it via farmers markets and their CSA.

We are currently looking for partners that can service our customers once the Summer ends. We have also sent all our customers in each region a list of the producers they love so that they can purchase directly from them – Seattle-Tacoma, Greater New York and Bay Areas.

DG:  You scaled back the team significantly. Who remains on the team?

BR:  We had to lay off all the folks that were related to our community business, the consumer facing business, but anyone who was servicing the CSA business and the engineering team we kept on. I’m not going to give numbers, but it was the majority of our employees.

DG:  What does the next iteration of the CSA platform look like? 

BR:  We’re looking at it broader than a CSA platform. Right now we’re servicing CSAs very effectively, but we now we have experience working with a lot broader array of farms than just CSAs. We were working with all kinds of farms, fishermen, bakers and food artisans that wanted to get their food to market. Some of them were CSAs, and some of them were even using our software, but the majority weren’t. We feel that we now know better what software tools we can give all of them, so they can sell direct to consumer if they want, to food hubs if they want, to wholesalers and distributors, to retailers, to farm stands, farmer’s market. As a business person you should have a very diverse channel and not put all your eggs in one basket. I think you need software tools to figure out how to best utilize each one of those channels, and I think we’re in a pretty good position, as far as what we understand now for their needs, to build that kind of software.

DG:  How many how many customers are currently using your CSA Platform?

BR:  It’s seasonal, so it’s between 300 and 400, depending upon the season.

DG:  What do you know now that you wish you had known when you started Farmigo?

BR:  Farmigo started as a software company. We were building software to power CSAs. We had built a nice business that we never stopped operating and that’s the business that we’re throwing all of our development resources at. The consumer side was so appealing as an entrepreneur and for investors, because a lot of big exits happen when you’re able to do a large consumer play. At the time, when I was doing the CSA software, I didn’t see the CSA industry growing fast enough, so that that could become an interesting enough play for investors.

What I see today is that the local food system has been growing. There’s a lot more passion both from the farm side, business side (i.e. food hubs) and the consumer side. I mean you’re seeing Wal-Mart getting on the organic side, Whole Foods certainly with their sections and restaurants that want to be sourcing from farms. The industry as a whole has grown significantly, but it’s still incredibly inefficient to source this stuff — and those are the kinds of problems I know we can fix. As a software guy, as a guy who’s been building business to business software applications with SAP that connects businesses and allows them to trade more effectively together, to trust one another and to have transparency, to me that’s a massive opportunity. It’s one that I didn’t think was big enough in 2012 and 2013, and today I think it is.

DG:  What’s your advice to entrepreneurs who are entering this space?

BR:  Really perfect the model in one region, in all respects. Get the software right, get the experience right, get the logistics right, understand how your unit economic engine is going to work, so that you can get profitable. Really have an understanding of all of this before you start expanding.

There is [also the]  question of when is the right time to raise money, because when you raise money there is an expectation that you are going to spend money. So you’ve got to find the right balance. You certainly don’t want entrepreneurs who are starving, and you need some money in order to experiment and try and fail at things, so I think that would be the tightrope I would work on with the entrepreneurs; Experiment and figure things out locally, raise some money in order to get that experimentation and work through it quickly. Otherwise it’s going to take you a very long time, and then when you start to really have an understanding of what that blue print is about, then you can start pushing more aggressively outward.

The post Why Farmigo Is Shutting Down Its Online Farmers Market appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Guest post by Dr. Robyn Metcalfe, Director of Food+City. The views expressed are are solely those of the author and do not reflect the views of Food+Tech Connect. 

At a time when Britain was eyeing Germany and Bismarck as potential threats to the balance of power in Europe,  a British writer known for books about fly fishing wrote in 1897, “War, Famine, and our Food Supply,” fraught with concern about England’s ability to feed itself. The author, Robert Bright Marston, was beside himself, calling attention to England’s reliance on Russia and America for wheat and corn. Noting how Napoleon’s army starved on the steppes of Leningrad, Marston wanted another flavor of protectionism — the construction of grain storage buildings that would enable England to live for three months if a war cut the country off from its main source of food supplies in Russia and the U.S. He wanted to buy time for British farmers to build local capacity to fill the missing imports from Russia and America. Marston knew food was critical to the health of their nations, both for social stability and to enable economic progress for all its citizens.

Anxiety and concern about the impact that wars have on cities’ food supplies continues today. New Orleans and New York City are keenly aware that disruptions — whether war, hurricanes or other breakdowns of the food supply chain — have received only improvised protections. Cities routinely talk about their three- to five-day food supply, not the luxurious three-month supply Marston was angling for. But whether or not a city needs enough food for three days, three months or three years —  is a question that deserves more attention by urban planners and food systems experts..

Syrians are happy to have three minutes to consume a hastily provided meal from the World Food Program. After five years of conflict in Syria, the UN and the World Food Program were finally able to restore full rations to Syrians after a lack of funding in December 2014 stopped the delivery of food to refugees in Syria. While the media talks about casualties caused by weapons, little is said about deaths caused by famine and poison through the food systems in countries now at war. Few are aware of the destruction of livestock and cropland, or the contamination of soil and water, over the long duration of some modern conflicts.

The ripple effect of the disruptions caused by wars is difficult to imagine. The most obvious is the breakdown of the infrastructure, especially in the transportation of food. In Syria, even the perception of a disruption in the delivery of food causes an increase in black market activity, rising food prices and higher incidences of hoarding. Pita bread, animal fat and potatoes quickly disappear into personal storerooms, and Syrians freeze and dry food for longer-term storage. As it becomes more and more difficult to transport food to Syria, Syrians are looking for more localized food sources. As commodities like fuel and flour diminish, people worry about being able to produce flatbread, a simple yet essential element of their diet. With the potential breakdown of Syria’s government comes the loss of state control of bread prices and ingredient supplies.

While not as long term and uncertain as the Syrian crisis, natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy bring home how food supply disruptions can upset the stomach of an entire region. In the aftermath of the hurricane in 2012, gasoline was scarce, transportation broke down and food logistics professionals trucking in food from around the world struggled to keep New Yorkers supplied with pizza and bagels. New York wants more than three days of food to keep it afloat in the future — twelve months would be nice. But who decides, and how do we ensure at least enough food for a country to adapt and find new sources of sustenance, as Marston argued for?

We need food to enter the conversations of urban designers, especially those engaged in creating smart cities. After all, it was the journalist Alfred Henry Lewis, who said in 1906 that “the only barrier between us and anarchy is the last nine meals we’ve had.” Join the conversation about how we can create smarter cities here.

Internet of Food is an editorial series exploring how we might use technology, new business models and design to guarantee healthy, safe and sufficient food for everyone. Join the conversation between March 23 and April 29. Share your ideas in the comments, on Twitter using #internetoffood, Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn, and follow the conversation by subscribing to our newsletter.

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Dr. Robyn Metcalfe is a food historian and lecturer at The University of Texas at Austin, Research Fellow at the School of Architecture, and Director of Food+City. Food+City is a bold exploration into the food supply chain to improve how we feed cities. Past careers include: heritage pig farmer, writer and production manager for Sunset Magazine, strategic planner for Arthur D. Little, Inc., and published author on a wide range of topics from food history to the theft of high technology. She also founded Kelmscott Rare Breeds Farm and Foundation in Lincolnville, Maine where she actively conserved endangered breeds of livestock for ten years.

The post Smart Cities Need To Get Smart About Local Food appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Secret Sauce: 10 Tips for Getting Your Product into Whole Foods is a guest series by the founders of Bandar Foods. Follow along as Dan and Lalit share their tips and tricks for starting and growing a specialty food company.

While you brainstorm your ideal Grandma’s Famous Sauce branding, you’re hopefully thinking through potential competitors and how your brand is positioned in the market. Maybe you want to go the natural route and compete directly on the Whole Foods shelf, or perhaps you want to be extremely affordable and go against the big boys at Walmart. Both are potential routes for your brand, but you’ll need to focus on one to start. First, choose the sales channel you’ll go after once you’re ready to sell.

#4. But The Sauce Is Awesome. Why Can’t I Just Sell Everywhere Immediately?

It’s possible your brand can quickly resonate with a universal audience, but you’ll have to first appeal to one group before all groups. Facebook first concentrated on college students before it became the most popular social network in the world. The goal for your first stores is to determine product-market fit and if your brand can resonate in your chosen sales channels.

Additionally, you won’t be able to afford to try selling everywhere as soon as you start. There are numerous slotting fees, free fills and marketing programs that need to be paid in order to secure shelf space. We’ll cover these expenses in future weeks. But for now, we are assuming that you do not have millions of dollars at your disposal. The purpose of today’s exercise is to help you think through tweaks to your branding and product differentiation before you start selling.

Where to Sell First?

Before you finalize your branding, research all these channels and think through which is the best fit for your product.

Specialty Stores:

WHAT: Wherever you live, you probably have a fun specialty food store that sells chocolates you don’t recognize. Typically more upscale, these stores often specialize in local, unique foods that no one else carries.

CONSUMER TYPE: The average consumer in these stores typically has plenty of expendable income and favors design and unique flavors. They crave exploration and are looking to find the next interesting experience. Markups are typically high in specialty stores, so the consumer is not as price sensitive as in other channels.

BRANDING THAT WORKS WELL: Packaging should be artfully designed with a unique flavor proposition. Typically these items can be easily given as gifts. “Local” brands do particularly well here as well.

Natural Stores:

WHAT: There are hundreds of independent natural stores across the country. Sometimes jointly owned as a co-op, these stores are often at the cutting edge of natural, organic and healthy food.

CONSUMER TYPE: The consumers in these stores are often fiercely loyal to their local co-op store and are well-researched on the types of foods they want to bring into their home. They are more likely than the average person to appreciate interesting or exotic flavors. Consumers here may seek unconventional dining experiences.

BRANDING THAT WORKS WELL: The “health food” image has evolved from homeopathic to hip. Still, label transparency, clean ingredients and clear certifications (i.e. Non-GMO, Gluten-Free, Kosher, etc) will help you win the favor of this consumer base.

Local Food Service:

WHAT: Depending upon your product, you might be able to sell it to local restaurants or other food service outlets, who can then sell it to their customers. This works particularly well for beverages, snacks or other “grab-and-go” items that can be sold in local delis.

CONSUMER TYPE: The consumer type entirely depends upon the restaurant, but the types of food service that are most likely to sell an unproven product typically pride themselves on their unique offerings, and therefore cater to an exploratory consumer base. These customers though are still price sensitive and may not be willing to spend $5 for a small bag of chips.

BRANDING THAT WORKS WELL: Local and affordable products. A deli with sandwiches named after the local sports team might be more willing to sell your locally-made snacks. However, you cannot be ridiculously more expensive than the cheaper options, or else you’ll never sell. Additionally, this channel is more challenging for items like pasta sauce which aren’t sold off the shelf. But try pushing the chef to make their meatball sandwich with Grandma’s Famous Sauce.

Online:

No matter what, start by selling your own product online. Set up your website using Shopify, or another e-commerce solution, and get your shop up in a few hours. Aside from being easy to set up (you don’t need any buyer’s approval first), you’ll be able to set your own price and keep the most margin. Start here.

Where to Sell Later

Once your brand starts to build a proven customer base, it will be increasingly easier for you to sell into the countless groceries, convenience stores, farmers markets, department stores, big box retailers, cafes, gift shops, airport kiosks, drug stores, specialty baskets, liquor shops, delis, cafeterias and roadside stands across the country. The purpose of today’s exercise is to understand that the very first steps you take will help define your branding and future customer base.

This might sound a little confusing at this early stage, but you’re not alone. There are many people in the industry who will be able to help you find your niche and grow. Next week we will start to dig into all the players in the specialty food game, so you can understand how the whole chain works.

Don’t miss the earlier posts in our Secret Sauce series!

• Secret Sauce: 10 Steps to Getting Your Product into Whole Foods (Intro)
• 10 Steps to Getting into Whole Foods: #1 Ensuring Your Product Is Sellable
• 10 Steps to Getting into Whole Foods: #2 Can Your Recipe Scale?
• 10 Steps to Getting into Whole Foods: #3 Develop a Standout Brand

The post 10 Steps to Getting into Whole Foods: #4 Finding Product-Market Fit appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

The food tech community got a chilling reminder last week: tackling big food system challenges, especially when it comes to distribution, is really, really complicated. It takes a lot more than good code, talented engineers and passionate customers to scale food tech startups that deal with getting perishable food from local farms to people’s doorsteps.

Last Tuesday, organic online grocery service Good Eggs abruptly announced in a blog post that it was closing its operations in all cities except for San Francisco, including Brooklyn, Los Angeles and New Orleans, effective immediately. The company laid off close to 140 employees.

Good Eggs has always been a food tech darling, which is one reason why the news came as such a shock. Within 18 months of launching its marketplace in 2013, Good Eggs had raised $52.5 million and expanded from San Francisco to Brooklyn, Los Angeles and New Orleans. Armed with a lot of capital, it quickly launched in these cities to test the viability of its model in very different markets. In the end, however, this move ultimately hurt the company, the producers using its platform and its customers.

I reached out to co-founders Rob Spiro and Alon Salant for an interview, but, unfortunately, they were not available for comment. None the less, there are many lessons to learn from Good Eggs massive downsizing. The following are some of my initial takeaways, which I hope will be helpful for other startups and investors.

1. Figure Out Your Model Before Scaling

The most important lesson, perhaps, is the importance of figuring out your model and ensuring that it’s scaleable before you scale. As Spiro explains in his blog post:

“The single biggest mistake we made was growing too quickly, to multiple cities, before fully figuring out the challenges of building an entirely new food supply chain. We were motivated by enthusiasm for our mission and eagerness to bring Good Eggs to more people. But the best of intentions were not enough to overcome the complexity. Today we realize that in order to continue innovating in San Francisco, our original market, in order to continue figuring out all the complexity that is required to achieve our mission, we cannot productively maintain operations in other cities.”

Though it doesn’t share numbers, Good Eggs seemed to have great traction in the beginning. It was regularly featured in the press, and it built a groundswell of support and enthusiasm in each market it entered. Figuring out your model, however, means more than finding product market fit. Sure, as a two-sided marketplace, you have to make sure you’ve built a service both producers and consumers want to use. But in some cases these are just vanity metrics. You also have to ensure that your model is fundamentally scaleable, that you have the right team in place to scale it and, most importantly, that you’ve figured out how to make the economics work as you scale.

If you haven’t yet reached scale in your first city, no matter how much money you’ve raised, it’s probably not time to launch in more cities.

2. Scaling Food Distribution Is Really, Really Hard

At the end of the day, Good Eggs is a food logistics company. It manages hundreds of fresh, perishable goods from food artisans and farmers, which it packages and delivers to peoples’ homes. While technology enables it to accept customer orders, streamline fulfillment and optimize delivery routing, technology is not a silver bullet. It is highly cost intensive to build fulfillment centers, establish and manage a network of suppliers and maintain inventory. And every city is very different.

Here’s what Spiro told me Good Eggs would be doing to address these challenges in a 2013 interview:

“We’re scalable because we’ve cut out the usual things that drive costs up. One of the reasons that’s possible is because we’re using lots of custom software throughout the process. Producers know exactly how much to harvest and make, which reduces waste. We’re not warehousing anything, all the food that shows up in our Foodhub is pre-sold, and goes out to shoppers that same day – that reduces overhead and makes for a really streamlined process.”

Two years later, it’s clear that software and reduced inventory were not enough to make the model scaleable. Is this something that could have been learned from one city?

There is a reason it took Amazon and Fresh Direct so long to expand to new cities: “The Last Mile Challenge,” the cost of getting goods from a distribution center to a customer’s home. To address this challenge, Good Eggs originally focused on central pickup locations and managing its own fleet of trucks to deliver groceries to people’s homes for a premium. It has since dropped the pickup locations.

Some organic online grocers like Farmigo, which also serves the Bay Area and Brooklyn, rely solely on pickup to address the last mile issue.  “I believe our business model of having an organizer in a neighborhood serve as a community pickup location is an extraordinary advantage in the category,” Farmigo founder and CEO Benzi Ronen tells me. “Our model allows us to avoid the massive costs associated with home delivery and can scale across regions in a way that is affordable for the consumer and economical from a business perspective.”

Others like Door to Door Organics do offer home delivery, but it manages the last mile by increasing the basket size of its shoppers. Subscribers sign up for a CSA-like vegetable and produce box subscription, and then are able to add groceries on top of their order. It seems like Good Eggs is also experimenting with bundles now.

3. It’s Infinitely Easier to Iterate Software Than Supply Chains

I don’t envy startups that are trying to innovate supply chains, especially perishable supply chains. Unlike engineers, who can get an app up in a day and start testing and iterating in real-time, food startups have a lot more infrastructure and people involved, which makes it more difficult to iterate.

Rob explains in his blog post:

“When building a software business, hard lessons are learned in code and quickly corrected; when building a food and logistics business, hard lessons involve people, and partners, and are very hard to correct.”

At the end of the day, online grocery is still very much the wild west. We’ll be looking into Good Eggs and other companies in this space over the coming weeks to dig deeper into what’s working and what’s not, so stay tuned.

Want more resources like this? Please consider contributing as little as $9, so we can keep bringing you the insights you depend on.

The post Why $53M Wasn’t Enough to Scale Good Eggs appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

A lot of people argue that healthy, organic food is expensive and inaccessible to the masses. To challenge this belief and inspire people to rethink their ability to eat better without breaking the bank, Edible Impacts launched a project called #30DAYStoSHINE.

Founders and self proclaimed “edible impactors” Alex Monroe and Brooke Sunness ate all organic, whole food, vegetarian meals on a budget of $5-7 per day for 30 days in New York City. They shopped for ingredients exclusively at Whole Foods and documented their 3 meals a day on their blog including recipes, photographs and daily nutrition and cost breakdowns.

The duo found that it is possible to eat plant-based, organic foods on a small budget, and they published their findings to empower others to eat better too. They drafted a 25 page manual, including recipe ideas, sample shopping lists and tips for eating healthy food on the cheap, as well as a comprehensive budgeting spreadsheet, which helps eaters create cost-plans for ingredients and recipes.

We chatted with Alex and Brooke via email to learn more about their findings from the project, their business model and their current project “exposed,”. Our interview has been edited for brevity.

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Food+Tech Connect: Can you tell me more about the inspiration for Edible Impacts?

Edible Impacts: We both love eating delicious foods including seeds, fruits, leaves, stems and roots, insatiable wild meat from the sea and tree nuts. We spend a lot of time discussing various preparations for these types of foods, shopping for these foods and researching histories of these food. Through our journeys into researching, cooking and consuming whole foods we became inspired by the opportunity to build social communities around food. Our conversations and research then began moving towards advertising, psychology, sociology, and philosophy. Finally, we decided we had some ideas that could create new perceptions about food…and here we are.

FTC: What is your business model?

EI: Through partnerships with small and large businesses and public organizations we are creating non-traditional campaigns and messages, what we call edible impacts, that influence consumers through mainstream marketing channels including online, social, and print media.

FTC: What impact do you hope to have?

EI: We are addressing a need gap that we see in the way in which whole foods are represented (or misrepresented) today. By building greater curiosities around food, challenging the current food system, and rearranging the framework that drives a person’s decisions, we are confident we can reduce the size of that gap.

FTC: What were your key takeaways from the #30DAYStoSHINE campaign?

EI: It’s easiest to write out our findings in list form.

1. How easy it is to cook, shop, prepare and make food once you understand a few insights that the campaign has taught us: Use quality, unprocessed, organic ingredients, pair with a legume or grain and top with quality olive oil and salt/pepper.

2. Organic food is even more affordable than we expected. We have pinpointed which foods drive up the grocery bill (meaning only to be eaten occasionally) and those organic staples that can be turned into many delicious creations.

3. The importance of being curious and willing to take risks in the kitchen – i.e. not following recipes or traditional rules and beliefs like roasting a banana to eat with beans and rice or making pizza out of something that isn’t white or wheat flour.

4. Learning about the short term gains from eating a balanced whole foods diet including increased energy, clarity, satiation, a closer connection to our bodies and a deeper appreciation and gratitude for our food and meals.

FTC: What’s next for Edible Impacts? Can you tell me more about your second project “exposed,”?

EI: We have created a #30DAYStoSHINE Manual, which anyone interested in eating on this budget or taking on the campaign as a challenge can do so. We hope to get more individuals and corporations to take on the effort as a challenge on a larger scale, so our objective is to continue buttressing the American understanding about accessibility, affordability, and tastiness of whole foods.

“exposed,” is the [un]dramatic reintroduction to [good] food.  It is a solution that we believe can create a massive paradigm shift in the way people view [good] food. “exposed,” is a social value collaboration concept–interest groups working collectively to create dynamic social campaigns that represent a shared vision and influence diverse audiences. By collaborating with creative doers, social influencers and industry leaders and aligning them to a cohesive message that challenges our food choices and puts [good] food on the stage, we can make an impact, one that is exponentially influential.

We’ve created three iterations of “exposed,” and are now focused on finding partners who are truly interested in the growth of this message.

• Real People Real Food: challenging identity. what makes you, you.
• Kids Menu: challenging the dismal consistency in children’s food options offered by most restaurants.
• What Lies Ahead: challenging “healthy” food appeal by removing “healthy” from the messaging

The post Edible Impacts Cooks Up Blueprint for Eating Organic on $6 a Day appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Every week we curate and deliver the latest food tech news, trends and startup resources to our readers’ inboxes. Tracking the top technology and innovation happenings across agriculture, CPG, retail, restaurants, cooking and health, our newsletter is the absolute easiest way to stay on top of the emerging sector.

From our roundup of the 42 food tech and agtech funding sources that launched in 2014 to Hampton Creek predicting its revenue will increase from $48M to $120M by January due to the avian flu outbreak, these are last week’s top food tech news and innovation stories. Like what you read? Feast your eyes on the full roundup here. Or better yet, sign up for Food+Tech Bytes and get the latest and greatest in food tech delivered to your inbox every week.

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1. Announcing ‘How Nutrition Tech Personalizes Eating’ Meetup

Join us on June 16 at the R/GA Accelerator for an inside look at Edamam, Ingredient1, Power Supply and more. Hear about their business models, tech and lessons learned.

2. 42 New Food Tech & Agtech Funding Opportunities Launch in 2014

A whopping 42 new funding opportunities launched in 2014 including 21 investment funds, 15 accelerators and corporate incubators and 6 crowdfunding platforms. Check them all out in one place.

3. Why There Won’t Be An “Amazon for Restaurant Supply” Anytime Soon

How Improvonia is streamlining the ordering process between restaurants and their suppliers without pitting suppliers against one another (a la Amazon).

4. Popcart Makes Bon Appétit and Epicurious Recipes Shoppable – AdWeek

Fresh Direct and Peapod are among its grocery launch partners.

5. Avian Flu Is the Best Thing That Ever Happened to This Startup – Inc. 

An epidemic that has wiped out millions of chickens is turning Hampton Creek into the world’s fastest-growing food company, says CEO Josh Tetrick.

6. NFL Star Russell Wilson Backs a Frozen-food Startup – Fortune

He’s the second major American athlete to invest in Luvo, a startup with a growth rate of about 50% that makes healthy, veggie-packed frozen meals.

7. Takeout Giant Delivery Hero Raises Another $110M At Over $3.1B Valuation Ahead Of IPO – TechCrunch

Funding cam from two unnamed “leading public market investors”.

8. How a Food Truck Empire Learned from Tech Companies without Becoming One –Pandodaily

An inside look at how bootstrapped Off the Grid has been profitable since day one, as well as its plans for the future.

9. Precision Irrigation Provider Hortau Secures $5M Investment from ACAP – Agfunder

The investment will allow the company to make its system more affordable and accessible to its growers, as well as to accelerate adoption.

10. As Much as 90 Percent of Americans Could Eat Food Grown Within 100 Miles of Their Home – Washington Post

This is according to a new study published by Andrew Zumkehr and J Elliott Campbell in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

The post Last Week’s Top Food Tech News & Innovation Stories appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Looking to launch a kick-ass food, food tech, ag or agtech crowdfunding campaign of your own? Take our Crowdfunding for Food Entrepreneurs Bootcamp e-course, taught by Lisa Q. Fetterman, who raised $1.3 million through two Kickstarter campaigns for her sous vide startup, Nomiku.

Got suggestions for other rad campaigns? Share them in the comments below. Hungry for more? Be sure to check out other food crowdfunding projects we’ve covered in the past here.

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The Fresh Connection, the NYC-based local food logistics company that works with sustainable producers and startups like Norwich Meadows, Quinciple and FarmerWeb, launched a Kickstarter campaign to help buy a delivery van (it currently leases its trucks). With the hope of increasing capacity, scaling its operations and expanding its customer base, The Fresh Connection is looking to raise $49,000 on Kickstarter. It has raised $11,000 so far and has 15 days to go.

Home-growing startup Cloud Farms launched a Kickstarter campaign to bring NIMBUS, its personal farm system, and BIOME, its window greenhouse to market. Together, the products allow you to grow full size vegetables with automatic watering and natural light. Cloud Farms hopes to raise $100,000 to fund the final tooling of BIOME and NIMBUS and to secure a commercial space in Brooklyn for assembly, packing and shipping.

After 14 years of community building and farming, City Slicker Farms is hoping to create a permanent home in West Oakland, CA. It’s looking to raise $25,000 on Barnraiser to transform a 1.4 acre vacant lot into a thriving community space complete with a community garden, fruit tree orchard, playground and greenhouse. It has raised $14,000 of its $25,000 goal and has 2 weeks left in the campaign.

Insect protein continues to gain steam. Crik Nutrition launched an Indiegogo campaign to produce the world’s first cricket protein powder. It’s raising $10,000 to help finance packaging, micro testing, raw ingredient procurement and the manufacturing deposit for its nutritionally dense and eco-friendly bug-based protein powder. With 20 days remaining in the campaign, Crik has raised 150% of its goal.

SaloonBox wants to deliver the makings for craft cocktails right to your door. Its looking to raise $40,000 on Kickstarter to launch its curated cocktail subscription service. It will feature recipes from some of San Francisco’s best mixologists (to start) along with all the ingredients you need to make them. The campaign has raised almost $36,000 and has 11 days left.

The sustainable alternative to the electric kettle, MIITO seeks to reduce energy and water waste with a sustainable, simple and adaptable device that heats liquids directly in its vessel. With 3,500+ backers, MIITO has exceeded its Kickstarter campaign goal of $167,383, raising a whopping $475,931. It will use the funding for an alpha test series, initial manufacturing and preparation for mass production.

Feather Coffee is a mobile-coffee startup that donates a percentage of profits to support rare disease organizations. All funds from its Kickstarter campaign will go towards purchasing the first Feather Coffee trailer and working to prove that its ’cause-brewing’ model is a profitable and scalable business.

Hivemind makes a bee hive scale with satellite communication links and a web interface that helps commercial beekeepers become more efficient. And now, it has launched an Indiegogo campaign to raise $74,000 to integrate WiFi connectivity and build a compatible smartphone app for backyard beekeepers, educators and hobbyists. Funding will go towards R&D, which includes electronics design and firmware, compliance testing and  app development.

Beer tech startup ManCan recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to take its new product, the ManCan 128, from prototype to production. Self described as a brewery in your fridge, the ManCan 128 is a one-gallon personal keg system that keeps beer fresh and carbonated. With two weeks left in the campaign, ManCan has exceeded its $70,000 goal and raised $143,457.

The post Food Crowdfunding: From Cricket Powder to a Craft Cocktail Subscription Box appeared first on Food+Tech Connect.

Heritage Radio Network shares the stories and voices of good food movement. The non-profit radio station broadcasts 40+ free shows a week out of a repurposed shipping container in Brooklyn, NY. Its programs cover everything from Food Waste to Tech Bites, and guests include food luminaries like Alice Waters and Michael Pollan.

Since HRN launched in 2009, it’s grown from a fringe passion project to a robust platform with 7,000+ episodes of archived content, live streams and food news. But its website is in trouble; the language it was custom coded in will stop updating at the end of the year and the site will cease to exist. So HNR is calling on the good food community to help fund a critical website rebuild. It launched a Kickstarter campaign in Early April and has seen tremendous support so far. HRN has 5 days left to reach its $35,000 goal, and only has $3,000 left to raise.

We caught up with HRN executive director Erin Fairbanks and deputy director Allison Hamlin by email to learn more about why the rebuild is so critical, what features the new site will have and their lessons learned from the crowdfunding process.

You can learn more and donate to HRN’s Kickstarter campaign here.

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Food+Tech Connect: You have 1 week left in your Kickstarter campaign to fund HRN’s website rebuild. Why this rebuild is so critical to the future of HRN?

Heritage Radio Network: HeritageRadioNetwork.org runs apps through Heroku’s Bamboo Stack, which will cease receiving updates in 2015. The alternative to a rebuild would be to migrate our current site to Cedar, the updated version of Heroku. But the process would be complicated and nearly as expensive as a rebuild because our current site is custom coded and has so much archived content.

Ultimately, we decided to take this opportunity to focus on dramatically improving our user experience by reimagining our site’s functionality. In the six years since we built the framework for our existing site, much has changed about our organization and our content. What started as a passion project- a “clubhouse for subversive foodies”- has become a robust network of hosts, partners and listeners. We’re ready to give them a site that is elegant, responsive, and easy to navigate. Our new site will allow us to share and showcase the work that is so important to our mission.

FTC: Why did you decide to go with Kickstarter, rather than Indiegogo or food-focused crowdfunding platform Barnraiser?

HRN:We put it out there that we were looking to use crowdfunding to back this project and collected feeback about the various sites. A number of our friends and partners have had great success with the platform- Lisa Fetterman with Nomiku, Mark Ladner with Pasta Flyer, Hella Bitters with their Craft Your Own Bitters Kit. We had connections within our network who set us up with the Kickstarter team, who gave us some invaluable advice and guidance on shaping our project. For our campaign, the functionality and tools Kickstarter provided allowed us to customize our outreach. And we loved their robust outreach to members of the site through staff picks, “Projects we love” emails, and their “Project of the Day” designation. Kickstarter also has offices in Brooklyn, which made it really easy to work with them in person.

FTC: Why did you feel crowdfunding was the right avenue for this project rather than applying for grants, loans or other funding sources?

HRN: Heritage Radio Network a community supported 501(c)3 non-profit. For us, the crowdfunding approach is part of our identity. It is a barometer for us to gauge whether what we’re doing is important to people, and whether we’ve earned their support. Crowdfunding, more than any other funding source, engages our audience and hopefully opens a door for them to be an active member of the HRN community in other ways.

FTC: What kind of community building, PR and marketing did you use prior to launching your campaign?

We wanted to have as much advice and resources incorporated into the final decision making process as possible. For the month or two leading up to our launch, we asked partners, hosts, leaders of companies and orgs we loved, friends, and other insightful folks to join our “launch committee.” They were integral to our vetting process, checking out our early site designs, the Kickstarter video, campaign page content and rewards, and giving us feedback about how to make them better. Once the project launched, we sent them social media to share and asked them to reach out to their networks to spread the word.

FTC: What have been your biggest lessons learned from your Kickstarter campaign so far?

HRN: We’ve had two big lessons:

1. It all comes down to the power of network, building and nurturing a strong community is vital to success. Putting time and energy into that work is the most important thing you can do as an organization. HRN has always operated on this principle, so it’s not really a “lesson”, but especially on our minds right now.

2. Asking is an art. If you have a strong network (see lesson #1), there are people who want to help.

Sometimes, yes, it’s about asking them to be a backer. But in this project, the most amazing work has been done by people who were able to introduce us to someone who could write an article about the station, or conducted amazing social media campaigns, or reached out to their organizations to ask them to participate, or offered to bartend for our celebration party. Finding the right “ask” may involve some creativity, but it’s always worth it. (NB: Amanda Palmer’s book, “The Art of Asking” was a big inspiration in this process.)

FTC: Can you tell us more about the rollout timeline and the features the new site will have?

HRN: Heritage Radio Network’s new site is the brainchild of the amazing team at Operation CMYK (seriously, they are rockstars). We’re completely reimagining how users will interact with the site, so there’s LOTS to look forward to. Here are our top three favorites:

A timeline view of the most recent shows and content. Tired of searching our site for the freshest and tastiest episodes? We are too. That’s why the landing page of our new site will have a visual scrolling timeline of the newest and best episodes. You’ll be able to peruse the past day, week or month by scrolling endlessly to the right.

A working search function. Our current site has over 200,000 tags and 7,000 episodes. Sometimes looking for that one show or news piece can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. We’re updating the coding on the back end with a more robust search algorithm. That means if you want to track the evolution of rooftop farming in NYC from 2009 to the present, you’ll have no problem hunting down each and every episode.

A place to share non-audio host and station content. Our new site will go above and beyond to create a space for sharing resources and continuing the conversation. There will be pages for hosts to share photos, recipes or any other content related to their show (think: Serial’s interactive website). We’ll also be able to share events, partnerships, the work of people + orgs we love, and so much more on this new platform.

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