Good Eggs, which launched last summer as the Etsy of local food, is expanding in a bid to become the Amazon of local food.
The San Francisco-based company launched a new web platform Thursday that lets users select items from local vendors and farmers and combine them in a single order ready for delivery or pickup. That’s transforming Good Eggs from a web stand for multiple vendors to a central hub for purchasing and delivering local food.
“We actually had the inventory for an awesome grocery store, but the missing piece was some kind of central distribution, some way for you place an order across all of these vendors and get a single pickup or delivery,” co-founder Rob Spiro told Wired. “We were experimenting with offices and pickup spots…. The model we found working well was very operational. You end up getting into the logistics game to provide a high quality of service.”
Unlike the traditional CSA (community-supported agriculture) deliveries, Good Eggs lets you customize what you want, to include specific amounts of fruits and veggies, fresh fish, prepared food, baked goods and more. You still pick from what’s in season, but if you hate potatoes, you don’t get potatoes.
To support its newfound operation, Good Eggs is moving into a giant warehouse where it can aggregate all of its vendors’ product and put together its made-to-order boxes of food. Spiro says that they’ve been running test routes throughout the San Francisco Bay Area to figure out which are most efficient, and naturally, the former Googler says that all routes are “optimized algorithmically.”
Delivery does, however, cost an extra $4, whereas pickups at various locations (there are seven in San Francisco) are free.
Unlike Farmigo, another online food startup, Good Eggs caters to the individual rather than the community. Farmigo CEO Benzi Ronen told Wired in December that his company opted out of home delivery because of high costs. Good Eggs’ Spiro says that isn’t so much a concern for him.
“We’re taking the challenge head on,” Spiro said. “We have all these producers already running their businesses through Good Eggs…. You place your orders, it goes directly to the producer, then it goes to this one warehouse…. The long-term goal is to build out hubs in hundreds of areas.”
Good Eggs is already in the process of signing vendors up in Brooklyn, New York City, and plans to expand to several other cities.
Good Eggs Aims to Be the Amazon of Local Food
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Good Eggs Aims to Be the Amazon of Local Food
