Solving Local Food — An Introduction To FreshSpoke
“So for decades now, what we see on our plate, has gradually come from distances that are further, further away from us. In fact, we import over 80% of the food that we eat, in Ontario and other parts of Canada and the United States. And this adds an incredible amount of waste to our food supply. It’s just inefficient. You know, the interesting thing is that we actually have an incredible shift that’s happening in consumer preferences, towards more sustainably grown and locally sourced foods.
The challenge with this is that local food doesn’t fit a traditional, conventional distribution model. The reason for this is because it’s a quality product, and it costs more to produce a quality product. So when you try and take a local food, and you try and integrate that into a conventional distribution system, that middle ware adds an amount of cost that can be anywhere between 15–40%. And this makes it very difficult for our local food producers to compete.
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We at FreshSpoke needed to find a way that we could disrupt that system, and be able to make local food more competitive, and in essence, give us consumers access to better quality food, that supports our local food economies and our own communities.
So, FreshSpoke, in essence, is a web and mobile platform that provides our local food producers with an ability to connect directly with wholesale buyers, using a set of simple, yet powerful tools. And they simplify the order, the payment, and the delivery process. Now, the root key to all of this of course, is our ability to be able to deliver. And there’s no question about it. Distribution is by far, the biggest challenge in the delta that’s created between small to mid-size food producers and the wholesale market.
So, that’s what we went after. We went after that piece in the middle, that distribution problem. And we do this, not the way you would think, through a conventional distribution system, where we go out and buy more trucks. The last thing we need are more trucks on the road to deliver local food. We tap into the excess capacity that already exists in the delivery system. And we give those drivers within the commercial sector, that have excess capacity, and are looking for back haul, the ability to onboard into our system as drivers, and earn extra income delivering local food. So, we’re really addressing that massive delta in the middle of these two, and providing a reasonable solution that actually is a way to actually drive more costs out of the market and make local food more competitive for those restaurants, those retailers, and those institutions that really want to access local food.
One of the key features of FreshSpoke is this notion of creating a community around local food. And this is a wonderful thing for everybody, because we now have the ability to all tap into that community, that crowd of buyers, and those buyers have the ability to of course, tap into that big crowd of sellers. So, we’re creating a great big huge community of like-minded people around local food, who, for a long time, have been craving some sort of solution that would make it really easy for them to be able to divert some of their procurement over to local food.
And this is really the sharing economy, because the sharing economy is what technology enables. It enables us to actually get our needs met from each other. So, in our case, instead of that money flowing into the hands of an enterprise business, it flows through the ecosystem, and into the wallet of a producer, where it belongs.” — Marcia Woods, CEO of Freshspoke.
