Startup provides online marketplace for Bay Area food producers

Between fighting for the last frozen turkey and waiting in snaking lines, the supermarket on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving can be a stressful scene. A Bay Area startup has set out to make shopping for food not only more efficient but environmentally sustainable.

Rob Spiro and Alon Salant founded Good Eggs, a website where local food producers can sell their products in the Bay Area. On this site, food shoppers can load up their virtual shopping cart with anything from locally-caught fish and fresh produce, to vegan pastries and baby food, which they can have delivered to their door step or ready for pick up from various locations in their area.

Last month, Good Eggs received venture capital from a cluster of backers, including Harrison Metal, which they will put toward rolling out their businesses in Brooklyn, New Orleans, and Los Angeles.

A former product manager for Google and co-founder of Aardvark, a tech venture, Spiro decided to get into the food business because he wanted to make locally produced foods more available to people in the Bay Area.

“Moving food is a huge challenge because it is highly perishable,” Spiro says.

The mainstream food producers have solved that problem through mass production and industrialization, he adds. As a result, much of our foods come from thousands of miles away and are loaded with with chemicals.

“[Good Eggs] has a different structure to their supply chain than supermarkets,” he says. “Its much simpler. We get the food to customers with in hours.” At the end of each day, Good Eggs adds up all the orders they received online and then tells each producer how much of their product they need to make or harvest.

After completing the order, the producers deliver their goods to the Good Eggs warehouse in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco. This is where Good Eggs aggregates all of the online orders, loads them in their trucks and delivers to customers around the Bay Area.

Good Eggs serves residents in San Francisco, Marin, the East Bay and the South Bay. The company sources the majority of their food from businesses with in 200 miles of San Francisco. They also only work with producers who stress environmentally sustainable practices, such as organically-grown produce or hormone-free beef.

A number of prepared food businesses in Oakland sell their products through Good Eggs including, Alternative Delectable Delights (A.D.D.), an organic vegan chocolate company, and Firebrand Artisan Breads. Renato Sardo, the owner of Baia Pasta in Jack London Square, says Good Eggs now accounts for 3 percent of his sales and he notices that he has gained customers in places he typically hadn’t sold to before.