Subtracting the Supermarket from the Food Supply Chain

How did you get interested in working on the agriculture-to-consumer supply chain?

I started Farm to People with my partner Anina and my father, David. He’s the one with the longest history in food. I was very lucky to grow up around him. He’s a huge inspiration. 

How so?

Before I was born and up to when I was a little kid, he ran and operated a number of small health food stores in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and then Westchester. Eventually he sold his Westchester stores to a group called Mrs. Green’s. Then when I was in middle school, he owned and operated a company called Mediterranean Organic. If you’ve bought organic capers, or sundried tomatoes, or red peppers, or preserves at Whole Foods or in natural products stores, there’s a good chance you’ve gotten that brand. 

I don’t think I realized as an adult how how much it really rubbed off on me while I was a kid. It was just my dad’s work. But our vacations were his work. We got to explore olive farms in Greece, and tomato farms in Turkey, and jam factories in Calabria. So it was a constant presence in a way that I took for granted. 

When I left home to go to NYU, I realized how different that was from most people’s reality—how we approached food, and how much we cooked at home. I couldn’t cook because I was in a dorm. But I was working at a farmer’s market, and that became my connection back to great food, people who cared about food, and local food.  

And how did that connection translate into starting Farm to People?

When I was working at the farmers market, I was really inspired by the idea of making it convenient and accessible for folks to shop and support local agriculture, where you know transparently where the food is coming from—all these things that are missing from our generic conventional supermarket experiences. So a lot of my conversations with David were around what solutions existed both for farmers and for consumers. 

I loved the idea of CSAs while I was at school, though there were a few things that got in the way for me and a lot of my friends in terms of actually joining one—the upfront cost, the lack of customization, the idea that you have to go and pick up your order on a certain day, and the weekly commitment. Busy young people—we’re commitment-phobic, so it’s hard to say, “Okay, yeah, sure, for the next 13 weeks, I know where I’m going to be every Tuesday.”  

I thought, how can we make a new kind of platform and a new kind of service that caters to this more picky consumer, while achieving the same goals of supporting local agriculture and small farms? It’s taken us years of different concepts and different iterations to really get to something that allows you to customize and pay as you go. We deliver to your house. We take away all the friction for customers, making it much more of a no-brainer for New Yorkers to actually make this a feasible, smart shopping solution. 

So is the idea to offer a more typical or conventional shopping experience, while reassuring customers they’re participating in a supply chain that’s more direct and supportive of farms and producers in the classic CSA vein? Or is that an oversimplification?

No, I think that’s a pretty great summary. A lot of our customers drop off in the summer and do their own CSAs, then come back to us in the winter. Or they go to the farmer’s market on Saturdays. Farmers use us in different ways too. Some farmers, we literally crop plan with them. We’re a meaningful part of their support. But other farmers will call us up when they have a surplus. They’ll say something like, “We have markets on weekends, we have a CSA, we work with restaurants. But this week we have 400 extra pounds of of heirloom tomatoes.” That flexibility is great. 

So much of our food travels so many miles, through so many hands, adding cost and diminishing quality. We want to go direct as much as we can because we can pay the farmer more and keep the cost down for the end customer.

The way consumers fetishize convenience—and I’m as guilty of this as anyone—feels very established and natural by now, since it’s how big supermarket chains have always marketed themselves. I’m not even conscious of needing or appreciating convenience, but I’m instantly annoyed at the slightest inconvenience or hindrance. I’ve been very well trained.

We have totally done that as a culture through the lens of of maximum choice and maximum convenience at the expense of sustainability, and waste, and losing consciousness about all the inputs. The whole idea of a supermarket is that even at nine o’clock at night when it’s closing, all the shelves are stocked and full. This idea of abundance at all costs—meaning higher prices in more ways than one—is not an optimal sustainable solution. Some would argue it works well for consumers. We’re used to it. We like that idea. If you were to go into a store at nine o’clock at night and see 90% of things sold out, it wouldn’t be a very inspiring customer experience. 

What we’re trying to do is provide enough. For example, for a while, we didn’t sell bananas or avocados because we were a much smaller company. We were mission driven, but at the expense of reality. Personally, I try to be conscious about all of my purchasing decisions. But I also would still sometimes like an avocado and a banana. 

So how do we strike that sensible balance? I’ve realized over the years that we can play a more sustainable role not by saying, “We’re not going to carry avocados or bananas,” but rather by carrying the best avocados and bananas on the market so that you can feel good about that choice, while you’re also shopping for local delicata squash and concord grapes. 

Farmers and producers are also very accustomed to selling their goods in certain ways, through certain established channels. How do you talk to a new farmer about what you offer, to entice them to join up?

It’s all over the map. The products we sell the most of for any given week are our farm boxes. They come in a couple different sizes, but they’re really like chef’s picks, or CSA style, or however you want to think about them. They’re curated around what’s seasonal and available. We move a lot of farm boxes, and the ingredients that come in those farm boxes are planned a little bit further out, and they need to come in at higher volume. 

But we also have products available a la carte. For example, this coming week we have pawpaw. Do you know pawpaw? 

I know pawpaw! 

Tropical fruit in the northeast!  A wonderful thing, but it’s it’s obviously a little bit more expensive. We didn’t have it last year. We couldn’t get supply. This year, we’re about to have a couple hundred pounds. But it’s going to be this very special treat that’s only available for one to three weeks.

That’s what’s really magical about our farmer network. You start working with one or two farmers, and then all of a sudden they’re like, “Oh, you know, the farm up the road has this.” We work with a farm called Sun Sprout in upstate New York in the Black Dirt Region. And we also work with a farm called Dig Acres, which is associated with the restaurant Dig.  Then there’s another farm called Fresh Meadow. They’re all in the same vicinity. Sun Sprout and Dig will often consolidate their orders up there and bring down the delivery together. So just like with customer referrals, this feels like farmer referrals. I love when that happens because it’s shared expenses, shared costs, and mutual collaboration. 

Okay, but where did you get those pawpaws?

They’re coming from a forager in Pennsylvania.

Speaking as a layman, this seems like a complicated business, having to flexibly manage lots of different types of inputs. Your system has to accommodate many different needs, requirements, and interests from the production side, let alone the consumer side. Was this always how you imagined the business would be structured?

It definitely didn’t start out this complicated. We’ve always created proof-of-concept products along the way. But we’re very understanding that we can’t be rigid in how we want the food system to work for our customers. We have to listen and adapt accordingly because we are still obviously competing with the Amazon Freshes or the Whole Foods or the Trader Joe’s of the world, which are still very much all about whatever you want, whenever you want. 

We have to think of it as this fun challenge of being a mission-driven business that is also customer-centric. We want to be a reasonable alternative for customers to say, “I’m going to do some of my weekly shopping away from a larger retailer and towards this more sustainable solution.” But they’re only going to do that if it works for their life. We all say we want to live sustainable lives, but that always comes second or third to price and convenience. That’s the reality.

How many farmers are you working with now?

We work with about 150 different farmers and producers. We work with small-batch producers like Sfoglini Pasta, and Jar Goods, who makes some beautiful tomato sauce in New Jersey. We’re not only doing fruits and vegetables. We work with meat purveyors. Stryker Farm is a great example in Pennsylvania. They do local pasture-raised pork for us. We work with Heritage Foods as well. She Wolf Bakery is amazing. Produce does make up like 50% of our sales, but we have really great dairy products, bakery products, and pantry staples. 

Is there anything that doesn’t work with your model?

Right now we don’t deliver ice cream, for instance, because logistically it’s too difficult. 

What’s the approximate range you pull from, in terms of products?

About 75% of our produce across the entire year comes from within 300 miles of of New York. That goes up to southern Vermont for some things, and western Massachussetts, and then down to Maryland. We work with an orchard down there for some of our peaches and strawberries. When it’s available in that 300-mile radius, we won’t source it from elsewhere. Though we do have more lenient standards around regionality in the colder months, when just not that much is growing in the Northeast. 

How do you conceive of the business growing? Is it a question of just adding more farmers and customers, or expanding your radius, or establishing new regions elsewhere?

I really love the idea of having localized markets. Right now, we’re very focused on building more of a presence in New York. I estimate that still only a fraction of this big metropolis even knows about Farm to People. While we’ve grown a lot, there is still so much room for growing more—having people know who we are, changing their habits, taking that first step and actually using Farm to People as a product. Which, in and of itself, is habit forming. Grocery shopping is an especially challenging habit to break because it’s something we’ve been doing since we were in the stroller with our parents. It’s a really deeply ingrained way of doing things. 

We want to reposition how New Yorkers shop, and how they consume, and who they’re supporting. But I don’t want to be a national brand that just ships from New York. I think the way we’ll grow is to have regional hubs, much like we have here in the Northeast, where we can support a different region of agriculture. 

Do you have any customers in the hospitality business who buy for their restaurants?

Restaurants ask us for products a lot, but to date it’s been more for collaborations and one-offs where we’ll bring in a special product for a chef who’s a friend. But it’s not a formal part of our business at this point. We’ve really just been focused on that end customer. Some chefs use us for their own home shopping, but we’re not set up for B2B. 

I imagine that business would be a lot of concentrated volume. Is that something you’d want to get into eventually though?

We’re an ambitious team for sure, but we’re not venture capital funded. We’re boostrapped and scrappy. It’s more of a question of focusing on doing one thing better than anyone else in the market. Changing consumer behavior and reshaping what people think about grocery shopping—that’s the place we can raise the most consciousness. There are hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who can learn about their food in this way. 

If you’re telling all this to one point of contact at a restaurant, it falls on them to educate customers and bring that mission forward. A lot of restaurants today in New York City are doing an amazing job of telling consumers what type of tomato they’re eating, or what the soil health was like. Chefs are definitely our allies in getting the word out there, and they’re making customers feel like, “Oh, I should be eating like this at home.”