Local, Organic Food Delivery Service Good Eggs Launches In SF To Bring The Farmer’s Market To You

Hey you! Do you live in the San Francisco Bay Area? Do you buy locally grown, organic and sustainable produce? Do you hate fighting the crowds at the local farmer’s market every Sunday just to get the veggies you need for the Shaved Fennel, Radish, and Grapefruit Salad you plan to make for your best friend’s dinner party? Of course you do! And boy have I got a startup for you.

Good Eggs is a new service that delivers organic and sustainable meats, produce, and other goods from locally sourced farms and vendors. There are lots of delivery services that will bring groceries to you, and there are lots of Community Supported Agriculture programs around to connect residents with produce from local farms. But neither does a great job of getting users the stuff they want, when they want it.

On the grocery delivery side, there are few services out there to cater directly to users looking to get organic, sustainable foods. And even if they do, they probably only work with a few local farms. As for CSAs — they’re great if you’re fine with getting a hodgepodge of whatever vegetables or meats are available any given week, but it’s rare that you can pick and choose what you want to match your weekly diet with whatever their farms have harvested.

By contrast, Good Eggs seeks to have all the choice that comes with going to the local grocery store, as well as the peace of mind of knowing that all your food is grown without chemicals or farmed using sustainable methods. And all the convenience of getting the stuff shipped from the farm to your door.

It’s done that by aggregating goods from multiple local farms and food producers, and creating a delivery system that can bring together a single order of local foods in under two days. Whether it be seasonal produce, meats or fish, breads and cheese, Good Eggs has a wide selection of products to order from a large group of producers. It even has various ready-to-eat meal options made with organic goods.

Altogether, Good Eggs has about 120 different vendors on its system in the San Francisco Bay Area. The magic of the service, though, is not in getting all of that stuff together in one place — it’s in actually getting the groceries to your door. For that, Good Eggs has built its own delivery infrastructure, including finding a way to collect goods from multiple vendors all in one order, and having its own delivery trucks to take orders directly to customers’ homes.

According to Good Eggs co-founder Rob Spiro, the company started out just providing its software to local organic food vendors as a way to take orders, track inventory, and fulfill direct sales on their own. That pilot launch happened last summer. But what the company found was that the vendors using its software needed help with distribution. So it decided to build the delivery system itself.

Today, that means that rather than going out to the local farmer’s market, you can have those goods brought to you. The company charges $3.99 for home delivery of goods, which is actually pretty cheap by delivery-service standards, and orders are delivered generally about two business days after an order is placed. Good Eggs makes money not just on the delivery fee, but also in taking a small percentage of orders placed through its system with individual vendors.

But all in all, it’s a win-win proposition: Users get the foods they want brought to them; vendors have greater reach and distribution to customers they wouldn’t have had before; and Good Eggs shares in the profits, all the while making the world a more sustainable, delicious place. Yays all around.

Good Eggs was founded by Spiro, who was a co-founder of Aardvark (which sold to Google), as well as Carbon 5 co-founder Alon Salant. The company has a team of 20, with other team members from Google, Yahoo, and various food companies. The startup has raised funding from Harrison Metal, Baseline Ventures, Collaborative Fund, Westly Group, Correlation Ventures, New Island Capital, Max Ventilla and Mitch Kapor.