Farmigo wants to bring locally grown produce to the places you already go — work, schools and community centers — and provide something approaching the convenience of home delivery without the cost.
The company launched its local food communities on Tuesday, an effort to deliver a personalized, online farmers’ market experience to entire communities. The idea is to make it super simple to order vegetables online and pick them up at a convenient location, like your office. Farmigo isn’t catering to individuals, and in fact won’t deliver veggies to anyone’s home. It’s all about going where the people are, whether it’s at work, school, church, whatever. And you’ll need to sign up as a community in order to access the service.
“Home delivery is very expensive,” founder and CEO Benzi Ronen told Wired. “The idea is that you come to work every day. You pick up your kids at their school everyday. You go to a community center if you’re working out there every day. We turn those into food communities, so it’s not an extra place you need to go to. The nice thing about it is that we are automatically going into an existing community of people.”
Farmigo’s local food communities will initially launch in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City, with plans to expand to Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, Denver, Chicago and Philadelphia. When you sign up a community, Farmigo provides food coaches, who will survey the people in that community and line up farmers to serve them. Each online market features five or six farmers offering everything from produce and dairy to meat and fish. People place a weekly order, which is delivered to your community location.
The convenience of online shopping and direct delivery could make local produce more appealing to people who don’t already shop at farmers’ markets. But this isn’t something everyone will want, or be able to afford. Fresh eggs cost $6 a dozen, and produce can run $2 a pound or more. That adds up fast.
Farmigo isn’t alone in the food-tech startup space. San Francisco’s Good Eggs also offers local food through a web portal. Whereas Good Eggs makes it possible for individual consumers to buy directly from individual vendors, Farmigo is focusing on catering to groups. Several companies already have signed up, including Brooklyn’s Etsy and San Francisco’s Kiva.
“I call it economies of community,” Ronen said. “We’re not trying to compete on economies of scale like the industrial food system. The only way you can create an alternative food system is to get the community to be part of the solution.”
Farmigo launched in 2009 as a cloud software company catering to farms that provided CSA (community supported agriculture) boxes. It has since expanded to provide software support to hundreds of farms across 25 states, which should make it easier to expand the local food community service. It’s part of a shift toward serving consumers. Ronen notes that less than 1 percent of the country buys food directly from farms through the CSA model. “We started to ask ourselves, ‘How do we become relevant to 20 percent of consumers?’” he said.
Farmigo will take a percentage out of each purchase made through its site. It has also recently raised $8 million in series B funding.
Farmigo Brings Community-Based Farmers' Markets Online
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Farmigo Brings Community-Based Farmers' Markets Online
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Farmigo Brings Community-Based Farmers' Markets Online
