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Innovation

Startup brings farmers markets to your door

Online services are delivering groceries, takeout and even ice cream trucks. Now, a startup is bringing locally produced foods to the family table.
Written by David Worthington, Contributor
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Good Eggs delivers from "farm to table"

Online services are delivering groceries, takeout and even ice cream trucks. Now, a startup is bringing locally produced foods to the family table.

Good Eggs works with local farms and food makers in some U.S. metro areas to help them sell directly to the consumer. The value proposition is healthier foods and altruism. Good Egg says that purchases that are made through its service ‘serve the community,' guarantee fair wages, and promote environmental sustainability. Participating vendors are held to stringent standards to encourage the creation of a local food system.

The concept of buying local whole foods isn't novel, but the Good Eggs distribution model is. Bakers, beekeepers, farmers and commercial fishermen sell goods at farmers markets throughout the United States. There's a weekly market by my subway stop every Friday. It relies on foot traffic, but Good Egg makes it a daily occurrence by delivering orders directly to the consumer or designated pickup sites.

Its guidelines for vendors, which are listed on its Web page, include mandates such as "working with the seasons, no artificial ingredients, no antibiotics for animals, cage free birds and no GMO ingredients or hormones. Put simply, you're be ordering locally produced whole foods that aren't mass produced and are as whole as possible. It's personal too: an image of the vendor appears next to item descriptions.

Good Eggs operates in Brooklyn, New Orleans, Los Angeles, and around the greater San Francisco bay area. Rob Spiro, the former product lead for Google+ and co-founder of social search engine Aardvark (Google acquired it) founded the company. Its board advisors are technologists, academics, and food experts.

Other startups sell into the traditional food supply chain. A company called Lufa Farms makes rooftop urban greenhouses that it says could operate on a commercial scale. New York-based BrightFarms engineered highly automated greenhouses that it believes could operate directly on top of supermarkets.

(Image credit: Good Eggs/David Worthington)

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