Editor's Note: This piece was originally published June 6 on BostInno.
When Aaron Damus co-founded Sprout Organic Farms in Providence about a year ago, the idea was to get fresh microgreens to customers as quickly as possible. Wait too long after they’re cut, and the nutrition value drops significantly.
“By day three or day four, you could be 30 percent down from what you had initially,” Damus told me. The potential benefits from microgreens, which are more nutrient-dense than their mature leafy-green counterparts, can easily be negated by long distribution chains. Plus, standard distribution costs can wipe away up to 50 percent of potential profit for a company like Sprout. What’s a startup to do?
Enter WhatsGood, a delivery platform for local farmers that officially launched in Boston Thursday. After a successful nine months testing its delivery system in Rhode Island, the company is making its way north to Fenway, the centerpoint from which it will deliver locally grown food, including Damus’ microgreens, within a four-mile radius. WhatsGood also offers local pickup options, including Turtle Swamp Brewing, Fenway Community Center, Chew Innovation, and the Parker Hill Branch of the Boston Public Library, with new pickups being added frequently.
“On the consumer side, you can see that the the benefits are huge: getting traceable, extremely fresh food,” Damus said. “On our side, it cuts out the conventional distributor. This is massive, because distributors take a huge sum of money off of what would be the retail price. … That’s a lot of the reason that it’s untenable for farmers to stay in business.”
Although it’s only about six weeks into its delivery program in Massachusetts (the program was in “beta mode” before its official launch), WhatsGood has the potential to be a game-changer. Co-founder and CEO Matt Tortora says retailers on his platform retain more than 90 percent of the sale value.
It’s a boon for consumers, too. Boston, Tortora believes, is a foodie town—but more than that, people here want to invest in local, sustainable food choices.
“What we believe the technology will do in Boston is really elevate the local food system to be on par with other big food retailers,” Tortora said. “A big part of what we’re learning about our customers, who would support the local food producers, is that they’re really very passionate about the idea that they vote with their food dollars.”
Tortora and his team chose Fenway both because it is up-and-coming, with new buildings seemingly rising from the concrete each day, and because it lacks local, organic food options. The major retailers in the area, Tortora noted, are Target and Star Market. “They’re fairly limited in terms of the quality of groceries and the nutritional density of the food that they can get,” he said.
WhatsGood itself rose from Tortora’s personal need. His family includes three children, all of whom need nutritious food. But getting kids to a farmers market first thing on a Saturday can be like herding cats.
“You know, Saturday morning, we were all over the place,” Tortora said. “And even then, only about six months of the year are the farmer’s markets open. Six months of the year, you have a lot less availability.”
Now, the app is intended to function like a virtual farmer’s market, making locally grown food accessible to all kinds of people.
Unfortunately, WhatsGood has yet to incorporate all of the functional aspects of a traditional farmer’s market. More than 200 markets across Massachusetts are able to accept SNAP benefits, but because of federal regulations from the US Department of Agriculture, online retailers are largely unable to process SNAP. Only in April did the USDA launch a pilot programin New York state, where SNAP beneficiaries can use Walmart, Amazon, and ShopRite to buy groceries online. (Tortora is frustrated by this: “If I got the go-ahead from the USDA, I could make it happen tomorrow,” he said.)
If you’re looking to place an order, here’s how it works: Open the WhatsGood app and select Boston Delivery. From there, you can sort by products or by vendors. Add products to your cart — bundles of carrots, bags of beets — and head to the checkout, just like you would on Amazon or basically any other online retailer. Deliveries in Boston happen every Thursday.
WhatsGood’s Boston farm partners include Under the Sun Farm, Ward’s Berry Farm, Trovato Schrage Farm, Sprout Organic Farms, Sandy Hill Farm, Hackamack Buffalo Farm, and Cascade Brook Farm. They are all located in New England.
At Ward’s Berry Farm, Alexander Hammond is excited to bring his product to a whole other market that WhatsGood has made accessible.
“Because we literally pick the day before or even the morning of on Thursday, they’re literally getting the freshest stuff that they could possibly get,” Hammond said. “So we think is a fantastic concept, and we’re excited to be a part of it.”
It seems that Tortora and his team have already earned the trust of the retailers they work with. Ed Canane, who co-owns Cascade Brook Farm in New Hampshire, has been raising cattle for more than 15 years. At this point, he is selective when it comes to commercial retailers. WhatsGood is one of just three partners he works with.
“We feel like we’re represented by a first-class organization,” Canane said. “Matt gets the whole picture. He gets how farmers need to work. He gets how people who dine needed to work. He gets the urban environment. With that said — along with their online platform, which from our perspective is fantastic — it’s so simple.”
Editor's Note: WhatsGood was named one of Rhody Inno's 2018 50 on Fire award winners.
