Good Eggs co-founders Alon Salant and Rob Spiro are techie-foodies, a classic Bay Area combo. Photo: Peter McCollough/Wired 
Walk into your neighborhood farmers market and you’ll see stands packed with just-picked fruits and vegetables, and tables lined with cheeses, baked goods and condiments. The smell of fresh bread and whatever savory food is cooking — mushroom empanadas, Indian curry, grilled corn — fill the air. It’s a colorful, sensory-loaded scene where local food takes center stage.
But what you won’t see is much technology. The local food movement is more often associated with the pre-microwave, pre-fast-food and pre-smartphone days than with cutting-edge tech. The majority of vendors at farmers markets go the traditional cash-only route, counting change in their heads and storing bills in a metal box. Ask them if they have a website where you can purchase their food, and most will shake their heads.
Good Eggs, a San Francisco-based startup, is here to provide the much-needed tech and software support to the local food movement. On Thursday, the company launched an e-commerce platform for consumers to find and buy food directly from nearby farmers and vendors. It’s essentially an Etsy for the local foodie.
“A lot of entrepreneurs are inventing other ways to get food to people outside of traditional grocery distribution channels,” Alon Salant, Good Eggs CTO and co-founder, told Wired. “That’s great, but it’s completely disorganized without any infrastructure or support. There’s a clear need here to make people’s lives easier.”
Added Rob Spiro, Good Eggs CEO and co-founder: “To the extent that we can help as technology entrepreneurs, it’s in building a better information infrastructure for the whole thing.”
Salant and Spiro both hold strong tech industry pedigrees. Prior to Good Eggs, Salant co-founded Carbon Five, a software development firm that has worked with companies like Disney, eBay and National Geographic. Spiro co-founded the social Q&A site Aardvark, which later sold to Google. For more than a year, he worked as a product manager for Google+.
With funding from Harrison Metal Capital and Baseline Ventures, the duo started Good Eggs with a simple, clear-cut mission: to grow and sustain local food systems worldwide. After months of talking with everyone from local farmers to everyday grocery shoppers, Good Eggs came up with a one-stop online shop that handles the transactions and user interface for local food vendors.
It’s similar to Etsy in that Good Eggs gives small vendors an avenue to sell their products online without having to build their own site. But what makes Good Eggs unique is that it’s built specifically with the local food industry in mind. Unlike other e-commerce platforms, Good Eggs doesn’t ship any food — everything is hand-delivered by the individual vendor or available for pickup at specific locations.
Good Eggs’ SOMA, SF neighborhood page. Image: Good Eggs
At launch, Good Eggs features 40 vendors in five Bay Area neighborhoods. In San Francisco, the SOMA, Mission, and Hayes-Haight-NOPA neighborhoods are represented, and there are also hubs for Berkeley and Oakland. Food producers vary from a gluten-free bakery to organic farms to ranches that sell boxes of pork and beef. Each vendor gets its own web stand describing the company and the products it sells. You can order food on a one-time basis, or via a subscription service, depending on what the vendor offers.
“Prepared food and community kitchens are very different from a ranch, which is very different from a bakery,” Spiro says. “Building tools to support the sales models of all of those companies, and making it really easy for customers to interact with all different kinds of food businesses, has been one of the more interesting pieces of the technology we’ve built.”
The site itself is slick and easy to navigate. It divides vendors by neighborhood, and then by delivery or pick-up availability. Businesses appear in a grid format, with a photo, name, and description. Once you click on a business, you’ll see whether you can choose to make a standing (weekly) order, or a one-time order. Photos of the food consume a majority of the page, and ordering is as simple as selecting an amount from a drop-down menu and going through a secure checkout process. And if you opt for pick-up, you can choose to get a text reminder to fetch your homemade granola or grass-fed beef.
Good Eggs also lists food-related events, like farmers markets, going on in specific neighborhoods. There’s an eater’s digest that features blog posts from famous foodies like chef Alice Waters and food writer Sophie Brickman. A sidebar shows you what fruits and veggies are in season, giving you advice on how to choose, store and prep the ingredients.
Another key aspect of the Good Eggs site is that when you first find a vendor, you don’t see the food they make — instead you see a photo of the actual person or people growing or making that food. And when you click on a vendor’s page, you can read a lengthier story about what they do. It gives each Good Eggs web stand more of a social networking feel than your average e-commerce site.
And for good reason, too. Making people visible is a key component to Good Eggs’ mission. It’s in the same vein as connecting people with producers via face-to-face delivery and pick-up.
“Our goal is to create connections between humans,” Salant says. “It’s creating the human connection between the producer and consumer. And creating a long-term relationship and supporting that relationship with our tools is empowering for us.”
This might sound like a quote straight out of Portlandia. In a faux-city like that, and the Bay Area in particular, where the local food movement is incredibly vibrant, Good Eggs makes sense. For example, the city of Berkeley recently passed an ordinance that allows people to sell the food they grow in their backyard, including fruits, vegetables, eggs and honey. And San Francisco has an underground market, Forage SF, where people sell food without having to go through farmers markets’ regulatory process.
Source: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/07/good-eggs-is-the-etsy-for-local-foodies/
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