Mike Stalbaum sat amid the crowd overflowing an auditorium at the Minnesota History Center, listening to founders in the first class of Techstars’ Farm to Fork accelerator spell out the problem they’re confronting in the food system.
“After the companies would pitch, I would hear people sitting around me saying, ‘Oh wow that is amazing. That is so cool,’” the co-founder and chief culinary officer with Local Crate said. “There’s a lot of excitement around this space.”
Just a year out of their own Target + Techstars experience and three years since its founding, Local Crate is poised to expand in other regions of the U.S. The company has embraced its new food- and ag-tech peers in its expansion. Renewal Mill and Big Wheelbarrow each announced partnerships with the locally sourced meal-kit purveyor during their demo day pitches.
Local Crate lists nearly 70 vendors in the Upper Midwest region supporting orders from people living in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois. They provide ingredients from fresh vegetables to meat to spices to baked goods. Another facility in California serves customers in that state. And they’re looking to expand to the Northeast with another set of vendors there.
“We work with a lot of different farmers and producers,” Stalbaum said. “All that information comes in singular form from each of them. What Big Wheelbarrow is going to enable us to do is get a full overview every week and allow us to place our orders with our vendors in a fraction of the time.”
Big Wheelbarrow’s helps grocery stores, restaurants, and others incorporate more locally sourced food by streamlining communication between buyers and the many small vendors they want to work with. Communication can be especially tricky when working with farmers who aren’t tech savvy or who don’t have an interest in learning a new system to communicate with buyers.
In the beginning, Big Wheelbarrow found that farmers preferred to send their lists of fresh produce each week via email or text message, and a new app wasn’t going to work into their routine. So Big Wheelbarrow built a platform capable of parsing text from those messages and pulling it into a digital dashboard so buyers can see inventory from all their vendors in one place.
At the same time, streamlining the supply chain for small producers means they can participate in a reliable market with rising demand. Local Crate’s business model, which uses regional hubs, cuts down on shipping and packaging costs, Stalbaum said. The company applies those savings to buying higher quality ingredients.
“I’m excited to introduce a technology that benefits both the consumer and a farmer,” he said.
