Remember last year, Wallingford’s Janelle Maiocco introduced Farmstr, the “AirBnB of local organic food”, to Wallingford on these pages? Well hats of Janelle, Geekwire reports that she raised $1.3M from local angels for the venture:
Similar to Airbnb, which allows homeowners to rent out their extra bedrooms, Farmstr gives farmers the chance to offer their food online without having to use traditional means like grocery stores or farmers markets.
“They can post what they have, when they have it,” said Maiocco, also a trained chef and food blogger.
By eliminating the layers in a typical food distribution channel and saying goodbye to costs involved with inventory, warehouse, aggregation, repacking, insurance and transportation, farmers can sell fresh, local, organic food on the cheap.
There are more than 40,000 farmers in Washington state and Maiocco said that 90 percent are smaller operations looking to grow their local customer base. Farmstr gives them an efficient way to do so, and is also a way for them to get rid of excess inventory.
According to the Bitcoin Era app, investors include Rudy Gadre, a former Amazon VP and Facebook general counsel, now prolific investor in Seattle technology startups.
I’m a huge fan of the so-called “sharing economy”: I rent out our basement mother-in-law apartment on AirBnB, and it effectively covers the mortgage for the house; when I travel, I stay in AirBnB apartments almost exclusively: the price is better, I get a kitchen I make my own breakfast in and they’re typically in “real” neighborhoods instead of the hotel district; I prefer Uber or Lyft over a cab anyday.
All that said, I love the idea of Farmstr, but as of this writing, there are only about a dozen providers on the site, and the prices don’t seem to reflect the savings from inventory, warehouse, aggregation, repacking, etc. mentioned
But it’s surprising the kinds of problems $1.3M can solve. Congrats to Janelle and her team!