GoodEggs.com: Farm to Computer to Table

Goodeggs.com is a web plat­form that makes it pos­si­ble for con­sumers to buy all kinds of locally sourced comestibles, and for farm­ers and pro­duc­ers to sell them. Consumers can order and have them deliv­ered, right to their homes. The site also serves to announce local food events and hosts a blog called Eater’s Digest. It may sound simple—but the site is the result of long-term con­sul­ta­tion with both eaters and pro­duc­ers, along with much test­ing and refining.

“We spent a few months just in pure research mode,” Spiro, CEO and co-founder of Good Eggs, told Organic Connections. “This meant spend­ing time with farm­ers and ranch­ers and in kitchens of var­i­ous sorts, and shop­ping with peo­ple in farm­ers’ mar­kets. We uti­lized a lot of research method­olo­gies that are com­mon in prod­uct design for web prod­ucts and also for con­sumer pack­aged goods.”

Solving Problems for Real People

“The whole pur­pose of these exer­cises was to meet the actual peo­ple involved in this movement—both the food mak­ers and the food eaters—to fig­ure out what spe­cific prob­lems they had in their day-to-day lives,” Spiro con­tin­ued. “Instead of sit­ting in a room and the­o­riz­ing about what was going to change the world, we wanted to actu­ally solve prob­lems for real peo­ple. Because we had done the research, when we started com­ing up with pro­to­type ideas we were able to go back to the same folks and say, ‘Hey, what do you think of this? Would you use this?’ Over months of learn­ing, we came up with and ulti­mately launched goodeggs.com.”

Spiro had plenty of expe­ri­ence from which to draw. “Shortly after col­lege, I started a com­pany with a few friends called Aardvark, which was a question-and-answer tech­nol­ogy,” he said. “I was involved with the prod­uct design and prod­uct man­age­ment. We worked on it for two years, built it up into a larger team, and ended up sell­ing it to Google at the begin­ning of 2010. Then I was with Google for a lit­tle while, assist­ing on the Google+ Project until that launched.”

But once he had expe­ri­enced suc­cess in web plat­forms, Spiro and some asso­ciates had other ideas of how to best uti­lize their talents.

“Right out of school I had worked for a short while on a friend’s fam­ily farm,” Spiro recalled. “He had inher­ited it, and it was a mid-size con­ven­tional farm sell­ing to whole­sale dis­trib­u­tors. It was really hard to make it work as a busi­ness with­out either grow­ing mas­sively in scale or sell­ing it off. So we recruited a few friends to go diver­sify the farm—set up shop at farm­ers’ mar­kets, a CSA, and other kinds of direct-to-consumer chan­nels. I did that for a few months and it was a whole lot of fun.”

Noble Purpose

That expe­ri­ence set the stage for Spiro’s next career move fol­low­ing Google. “The gen­e­sis of Good Eggs was that I and a few folks who had worked together in the tech­nol­ogy indus­try got together,” he related. “We knew we could build great web soft­ware, and we wanted to start a com­pany that would build web soft­ware for a noble pur­pose. We chose the mis­sion to grow and sus­tain local food sys­tems world­wide. We were inspired by the suc­cess of the local food move­ments and the growth of farm­ers’ mar­kets and CSAs nation­wide, and the pace was only accel­er­at­ing as there became more aware­ness and more pro­duc­ers out there. We said, ‘This move­ment needs some infra­struc­ture and it needs some soft­ware.’ We didn’t really know what that looked like as a prod­uct, but we set off to fig­ure it out.”

As goodeggs.com started to become estab­lished, Spiro and his co-founders were able to gar­ner assis­tance from a list of notable investors and advi­sors. These included famed chef and sus­tain­abil­ity advo­cate Alice Waters, who reg­u­larly con­tributes to their blog; Damon Horowitz, Google in-house philoso­pher and direc­tor of engi­neer­ing, who serves as Good Eggs’ “philosopher-in-chief”; Michael Dearing, founder of Harrison Metal Capital, who serves on the board of direc­tors of Good Eggs; and sev­eral others.

Click any image above to see a larger version.

“People are pretty recep­tive to this idea that there’s a mas­sive change going on in America in the food sys­tem,” Spiro said. “It’s being decen­tral­ized rapidly. It’s some­thing that’s hap­pen­ing with­out a lot of tech­nol­ogy, and we can come in and help out by doing what we do best and assist­ing the food mak­ers to do what they do best. Everyone has been really respon­sive to the idea; there are so many peo­ple that want to see this move­ment succeed.”

Spiro and his team are con­stantly on the look­out for new ven­dors. “As we have built this net­work, the orig­i­nal peo­ple we brought on board have intro­duced us to oth­ers. With this launch, we have been attract­ing many of the ven­dors and pro­duc­ers who have been into this kind of com­mu­nity. We’ve had a lot of sub­mis­sions through our web­site already, and we’d love to hear from more folks. We’re telling the story of what we are about, hop­ing that peo­ple find us. Also as we expand into new mar­kets, we’re mak­ing an effort to eat the food, be in those mar­kets, and taste as many things as we can. Your taste buds lead you in the right direction.”

With this firm foun­da­tion, rapid expan­sion plans for goodeggs.com are already in the works. “The chal­lenge in the com­ing weeks and months is to expand through­out the San Francisco Bay Area; right now we are in a few neigh­bor­hoods,” said Spiro. “Then we want to be offer­ing the food really broadly. We have picked sev­eral cities that we will expand to next: Brooklyn; Portland, Oregon; Los Angeles and Detroit. We’re start­ing to meet peo­ple in those com­mu­ni­ties now.”

And the name of the site? It may sound odd—but to Spiro and his part­ners, it makes per­fect sense. “It was a tem­po­rary name for this project,” Spiro explained. “We didn’t know what we were going to build, but we knew that we wanted to be ‘good eggs’ about it. As we started work­ing with more of these food pro­duc­ers and get­ting inspired by them, it ended up really fit­ting. The folks who are actu­ally grow­ing this food, rais­ing it and cook­ing it are start­ing these busi­nesses based on real val­ues, and they have so much integrity that they’re just the ‘good eggs’ in this system.”

For more infor­ma­tion, please visit www.goodeggs.com.