The Independent View: Farmigo is Like Uber, But for Farmers' Markets

Community-supported agriculture is great. But, at times, you can be bombarded with chard, or wonder what the heck to do with garlic scapes.

What if you could have a weekly box of locally grown produce, only you get to choose exactly what is in it. That’s the idea behind Farmigo, a startup with a service that allows a consumer to “ditch the supermarket,” as its website says, and instead purchase fresh foods from area farms online and pick them up at a neighborhood location.

Farmigo’s founder Benzi Ronen, who has spent 20 years in the technology world, decided it was time to use technology to remove a lot of the middlemen in grocery shopping, so that there could be a fair payback to farmers and the food could still be affordable to consumers.

There is a consumer side, and there is a supply side. On the consumer side, we are just not getting access to the best, healthiest produce possible that is fresh, directly from harvest and grown sustainabily. On the supply side, we are not giving the majority of the funds to the actual growers of our food. Just as an example, distributors and retailers give the farmer 20 to 30 percent of what the consumers spend, and that doesn’t enable the farmers who are doing the best job and growing sustainably to become highly profitable enterprises and expand their work.

Farmigo is an online farmer’s market. their mission is to create a better food system, that’s better for the eaters and better for the farmers. The way they do this is to connect the farms directly with the consumers. That enables them to pass on 60 percent of what the consumer pays directly to the grower or the maker of the food, and it allows the consumers to get their food direct from harvest, so that it is fresher than anything they can get at the supermarket. They have full accountability of where their food is coming from.

Farmigo started in 2009 as a software company, building software for farms to be able to sell direct. They still do that to date and have about 400 farms that are using that software. But they saw two things happening. The farms were coming to them and saying, “I need help with the logistics. I’m really good at growing, but I’m not as good at coordinating the logistics or marketing and sales to find the customer. I need more access to customers.” They did a lot of market research, and there was also a huge segment of the population who said, “I aspire to buy my food at the farmers' market each week instead of going to the supermarket, but I simply can’t get there because of the time windows or the location of it.”

They saw that as an opportunity to build a service that would give this kind of food to a much broader segment of the population, and do it in a way that was much friendlier to the farm.

The consumer picks a pickup location that is in their neighborhood, or they can create a new one. Then, they select online from the different items that are in the market. They can see, for each item, exactly which farm it is coming from and the story behind that farm. They place their order, that order than goes directly to the farms and the food makers, so that they can harvest it in an on-demand, just-in-time system. The farmer then delivers what was pre-ordered to our local warehouses, so that we can pack each individual order, which might contain things coming from 50 different farms and food producers. Farmigo gets these orders delivered to the respective pickup locations in each neighborhood.

In order to pass savings to the consumer and give them a price point that is about 10 percent less than, like Whole Foods, and pass on 60 percent to the farm, and ensure that Farmigo can be a profitable business entity, they have volunteers that they call “organizers” in each neighborhood. They create a convenient pickup location for people in their area, and then they also do the outreach to find people who share the same values that Farmigo has around this kind of food and where it comes from.

Schools can be pickup locations. When you are coming to pick up your kids, your order is there and you can take it home, so you are not going out of your way. Ten percent of the sales become a fundraiser for the school, towards their nutrition program or their school garden.

Synagogues and churches are great pickup locations. Apartment buildings are pickup locations. People are even doing them out of their homes.

There focus is the once a week large shopping that you do to fill up the fridge and the kitchen with your fresh items. There is still a need to do your stopgap purchases during the week when you run out of something. Farmigo is not the best at that. There you might have a local bodega, or you might have a service that you are willing to pay some extra money for to get those things delivered to you within a couple hours.

They are in all five boroughs of New York City, and are pushing out in all directions in New York. They are in New Jersey, Northern California, and the Seattle region.

They measure their success by the number of organizers, these volunteers, that they have basically building these communities. They are an indicator of the demand. You can also look at them as virtual retailers or virtual food cooperatives. Today they have about 400.

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