Calling All Foodies: Y Combinator’s Foodoro Launches Online Farmers Market | Hacker News Reader

Calling All Foodies: Y Combinator’s Foodoro Launches Online Farmers Market

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67 pointsvaksel49 comments

We've been eating these for the last couple weeks, and they're excellent:

http://deesminiorganicdoughnuts.foodoro.com/products/crazy-e...

You have to be in the Bay Area to get them though.

wow, this looks good. Will have to try them.

PG, you have to check out gelayo gusto. It's on el camino right after castro st in Mountain View if youre going towards Palo Alto. Best gelato I've ever had and the people that run it are pretty damn cool.

They look dangerously addictive.

Wow, I've never seen YC fund a direct clone before. I'm not saying that's the case, it just really looks like it to a layperson. Foodoro looks very similar to Foodzie, just better executed (widgets, more shipping options, less cluttered design, easy to use navigation, etc).

But it's so similar that I just can't get over it. And it's not just similar in terms of business model and timing of the startup's launch, but even the home page layout! A big full-width "featured foodmaker" box with a grid of "featured products" right below.

Considering fooddude is aware of other startups from the "several other competitors in this space" comment, I have to ask if this isn't just a blatant rip of Foodzie?

Food Sells and when they make it nice looking, it prolly sells a ton more.

I wonder if there's any value in "solving" the shipping cost problem by having something like Amazon's Prime -- an upfront fee of $80/yr then free 2 day shipping?

It changes shopping psychology. Once Prime is purchased, people want to buy many things to increase the return on their investment. :)

We believe there is huge value solving this shipping issue, especially for perishable foods. I've heard from an insider that Amazon Prime hasn't made money yet... and they have massive economies of scale.

We're definitely thinking about how to take steps to making shipping more palatable for consumers.

But I've heard that they more than make up for it through the increase in purchase volumes.

Nothing like trying to make up for a loss with volume! (Speaking as a prime member, I have a sneaking suspicion they are losing money on a lot of my orders. However more frequent those may be.)

I was thinking of buying some of the Marvelous Marinara (http://couplaguysfoods.foodoro.com/products/marvelous-marina...), but I'm reluctant to buy food if I can't read the ingredient list, and I didn't see one. I'd excited to see how this develops though, since I'm often trying to buy food online.

Great point... if you email me jay@ then I'll get that info for you directly from the "coupla guys" who make the stuff. We'll post it to the product pg, too

Done. Thanks very much :-).

Yeah, we are often looking for vegan food and it's going to be almost impossible to determine that unless the ingredient list is available. Maybe as simple as a photo of the ingredients/nutritional info would work?

It might be handy just to figure out the most common foods people avoid - vegan, vegetarian, wheat gluten, nuts, I'm sure there's others - and have a labeling system.

$15.50 for a jar of sauce? That's an absurd amount for what's most likely simply tomatoes, salt, olive oil, garlic, onion and perhaps some dried herbs. Tasty I'm sure, but marinara is one of the easiest sauces you can make.

(Looking back, it's probably not the money as much as that I just like to cook. I'd actually get enjoyment out of the process instead of feeling like a sap for paying that much for tomato sauce.)

Almost ordered something until the shipping costs doubled the price.

Shipping perishables can be expensive, especially when you're talking about ice cream or meat or vegan tamales.

What we're hoping to do is get enough foodmakers to sign up so that we can have more regionalized products that don't have to travel as far (and hence, have lower shipping costs). One extreme example we have currently, is Dee's Mini Organic Doughnuts, which have $0 shipping costs for the consumer but also have a limited delivery area (SF Bay Area). Imagine if there were many mini doughnut makers in small and large cities...

Yeah, but when you get the ice cream it's packed in dry ice. You can have a Moment of Science as you drop them into warm water.

If you put a fair dollar value on your time, it's shocking how much a trip to the grocery store costs.

Great idea.

I just started using a local CSA and love it. This is a perfect site for the farmers market crowd.

You'd have to do this. I was incredibly tempted to get some buffalo meat, but when you price it all out, it's still more expensive that going to whole foods and getting it (plus at whole foods I get to see the meat in front of me).

Looks like a great idea though. Would love to see more exotic meats on there (venison? quail? ostrich?).

When costs become comparable to Whole Foods, I'll definitely be placing an order!

Is there any way to search by region? I wanted to build a search restricted to vendors in New England, where shipping costs to Boston are probably lower, but I couldn't immediately figure out how to do so.

For obvious reasons I expect many if not most of the vendors to be on the West Coast, but hope springs eternal...

Congrats guys. Looks really good

Edit: Since I got karma for not saying anything, I will add that

a) I stayed over at Foodoros and ate lots of food so I can guarantee it tastes ridiculously nice

b) It is a big market and they are going to be massively successful because they are smart and get it :)

Foodoro might have trouble competing with the likes of Zingermans, who offer most of the same benefits, but also act as extremely reputable curators for the goods they offer.

This also goes against the "foodie" trend of "locavorism", trying to source everything from within 100 miles of where you live. On the other hand, that's also a business opportunity; for instance, I'm trying to source a whole side of local heritage pig, and the "sales interfaces" of good local farms is predictably awful.

Have you talked to the folks at Marlow & Sons? They can probably order you a whole side of local heritage pig. (I notice you're in NYC)

Also: Would be interested in brainstorming ideas on 'sales interfaces for local farms' with any interested parties.

Unfortunately (actually, very fortunately for me), I'm in Chicago; my partners are in NYC. Dave, our president, is a trained chef. He lives in an apartment the size of my back deck, but I still told him about Marlow & Sons, in the vain hope that he will buy a whole pork belly and confit it for me for the next time I come out to Manhattan. Thanks!

Zingerman's is a terrific store--some refer to them as the tastemakers of specialty food. But we think that Zingerman's represents a different way of doing things.

First, they warehouse and ship products themselves which means added distance, less freshness and limited warehouse/shelf space. The margin structure can be tough for the small producer dealing with a physical retailer.

Second, we want people to connect more directly with foodmakers. Zingerman's makes the products their own in a sense. They don't have any photos on their website, for instance--they illustrate them all in the Zingerman's style. And Zingerman's has been pushing their own private labels heavily.

Finally, you're absolutely right that the tools consumers are forced to use are pretty bad. We want to make it as easy to buy from a small heritage pig farmer as it is buying from Amazon.com.

So, you don't carry inventory or have purchasers? How does fulfillment work? Just curious; you're more of an Octoparts than a Dartagnon?

You are correct. Although we have a fully integrated e-commerce cart and checkout so users don't have to leave the site. On Octopart, I think it links off to the vendor's website.

More of an Etsy.

Looks pretty tasty.

Do the sellers on the site have to undergo any verification or inspection? I'm not sure, but I would assume that food in grocery stores has to get a license and be inspected by the FDA or something.

Basically, how do I know they aren't putting lead in my food?

I'm not really paranoid just curious how this process works.

All our foodmakers on our site are licensed and certified to sell food. We have a pretty rigorous standard on who can list on our site, so it's very unlikely you'll find lead in your product. In fact, most of the food on our site is much healthier than something you'd find at the supermarket.

This is a great idea!!!

Now for another idea that someone may want to run with: a similar concept for local farms that don't ship -- pickup only.

The idea came to me because I live on a small hobby farm and I produce eggs (thinking of getting a few pigs for meat & goats for milk...). Much more than my family needs, but not worth the effort of marketing and selling them, so I just give away the excess; nobody refuses farm-fresh eggs! There's another farm not far from here that sells bison (buffalo) meat, but you must preorder months in advance. His sales are from a big sign out on the road.

What I'm proposing is a site where small farms that want to sell their wares but simply don't have the time to do consumer sales & marketing could list what we have available, customers in the city (we're about 40 minutes outside Minneapolis/St Paul and not far from many suburbs) could prepay online and then pickup what they need when it's ready and the site can take a cut of the proceeds, or better yet, advertise local restaurants, cookbooks, etc to make a profit. Then the "little guys" like me can make a few extra bucks, the consumers get local, fresh meat & produce, and everybody ends up ahead. I'm not very interested in webapps, so I'm not likely to pursue the idea, but I think it's viable.

From someone who orders lots of food online -- nice work. I've been wishing a site with this purpose existed for years.

I will note that the prices seem quite high for many items compared to similar items available elsewhere, but from a business standpoint I suspect that's OK. To my knowledge, the demand for organic food has always exceeded supply.

The prices for many items are high. But all of this food is literally crafted or gathered or produced by hand. For instance, one lady wakes up on weekends at 4AM to harvest seaweed at a beach.

We think that the gifting will drive a big portion of sales--for the same reason that people by cut flowers to give to people. And food tastes much better, too!

Sooo ... I (along with partners) have a similar marketplace launching < 2 months. We've already got vendors on board.

That would make 3 startups in the space. I suppose there's nothing to stop a vendor from using more than one place, so it will be exciting to see how this space plays out.

The site looks great–nice job.

We've looked at the market and it's pretty big...and there are already several other competitors in this space. But, I'm a believer that competition is good for the consumer and us.

Thanks for the kind words!

This is pretty amazing. I would love it if there was a way to view various types of food and merchants by region. I'm from the Raleigh, North Carolina area where we have many awesome local farmers markets. However, i'm at college in the midwest and would love to be able to get some of these items online. I have no doubt that this will take off, but when it does and all the various merchants from nc sign up, being able to find them quickly and easily will be a great addition.

we have a filter by state if you click on "Foodmakers" from the top navigation bar. as we get additional merchants to join, we can work to make regional search more useful.

what products from NC do you miss the most?

Theres a number of bakeries that I really miss getting stuff from. Also, salsa, coffee, sweet tea, jelly, and barbecue sauce were always the best at the farmers market. I'm going to be down there for my spring break, when I stop by i'll be sure to let some of the merchants know about your site.

This is amazing! I am reading Omnivore's Dilemma (great read BTW) and it explains how the US food industry causes 1/3 of the carbon emissions, mostly in shipping and farm equipment usage. They call this the hidden cost that we all ignore.

A site like foodoro can connect local producers and consumers.

A example of a farm that sells only locally and never ships their produce ( to reduce carbon foot print ) is http://www.polyfacefarms.com/

Congratulations guys!

How are you handling the images of the products? Just curious because I find some of the pages (especially the single product pages) really eye catching but some of the product listing pages like this one: http://foodoro.com/search?filters=c12&sort=popularity are a bit more visually confusing (at least to me).

Still, nice idea, nice work.

I had the little mini dough nuts: http://deesminiorganicdoughnuts.foodoro.com/products/top-sel...

Their tasty goodness was well received.

Site looks nice. Since you're watching this thread, the front page slideshow doesn't work in the latest Chrome dev build.

Gotta love x-browser issues... We'll take a look, though it's probably lower priority for us. It works in Chrome release version.

This looks very cool, I can't wait to see if something like this gets adopted to other countries and cities

mmmmm... metrosexual homer wants little flavor donuts...

But seriously, congrats on the launch.

My only gripe is that there are too many things to select from, and that the average gluten will go broke wanting to try every damn thing listed on the site.

Wild Nori? Sold!

Search and discovery is a tough nut to crack, but we think constantly about how to solve it as we grow the marketplace.

On the flip side, discovery can be very rewarding. I'm glad you like the Wild Nori--I had no idea such things existed until recently...and I spend a healthy chunk of time looking at cool food companies.

Interesting design choice in your favicon... where have I seen that before?

congrats!!

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