• About & Contact Us
  • SEO Community

Ulancer.com

    • Latest Stories

      What is new?

    • Meet the startups that pitched at EF’s 10th Demo Day in London

      September 27, 2018

    • Rally Rd., the app that lets you invest in classic cars, raises $7M Series A

      September 27, 2018

  • News
  • How to’s
  • Writing
  • Startups
  • Jobs
  • More
    • CMS Tools
    • APPS
    • Web Resources
      • Advertising
      • Firefox
      • Scripts
      • Tools

Farmer’s Fridge wants to make eating healthy food as easy as getting money from an ATM

  • by Ulancer Contributor
  • In Startups
  • — 26 Sep, 2018

Fast, healthy food is one of those concepts that just seems too good to be true. But Farmer’s Fridge, a Chicago-based startup that recently closed a $30 million Series C round led by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, aims to make that a reality.

Farmer’s Fridge retrofits vending machines to serve up healthy foods — salads, sandwiches, granola, etc. — for people on the go, for anywhere from $5 to about $8. In order to ensure restaurant-quality food, Farmer’s Fridge has a chef on board who receives feedback from customers to constantly tweak the menu and the food. There’s also a large workforce in place to restock the food, which is prepared daily in Farmer’s Fridge’s kitchen, every morning. I tried the food while I was in Chicago, and I must admit that it was good. And this is coming from someone who generally dislikes salad.

While the amount of waste is low (about 5 percent left over) — thanks to its allocation algorithm that determines how much of each type of food to stock in each vending machine location — Farmer’s Fridge has a system in place to deliver leftover food to the Greater Chicago Food Depository, a food bank that works in partnership with 700 agencies, including soup kitchens, shelters and pantries.

“The hypothesis for the business is that it’s been done for ATMs, it’s been done for movies, and those things have nothing to do with each other. So the only connection would be that consumers generally want things that are faster and cheaper and more convenient, as long as they don’t have to sacrifice any quality from the experience,” Farmer’s Fridge founder and CEO Luke Saunders told me at the startup’s headquarters in Chicago.

Farmer’s Fridge founder and CEO Luke Saunders at the startup’s Chicago-based HQ

“So, renting a movie from a kiosk — there’s no difference,” he added. “It’s the same movie when you get home. With food, though, it was interesting because there’s a lot of businesses where the experience is supposedly the most important part, so ‘if you have really good service at a restaurant, could technology actually replace that experience’ was the core question of the business. Or is that an important sustained advantage for a restaurant versus our business model?”

So far, it’s been working. Since launching in 2013, Farmer’s Fridge has deployed 200 vending machines throughout Chicago and Milwaukee. Farmer’s Fridge vending machines can be found in airports, hospitals and in traditional retailers, like pharmacies, convenience stores and even the Amazon Go store in Chicago. Each location gets stocked at least five days a week, while the airport gets stocked seven days a week. Depending on the business partner, Farmer’s Fridge has a revenue model that ranges from subsidized accounts to revenue shares.

“Each vertical behaves really differently,” Saunders said. “In a hospital, they care more about having an amenity overnight for employees who don’t have access to a cafeteria than they do about profitability. At O’Hare International Airport, it’s a revenue share because of the traffic generated. For some retailers, it’s about the traffic Farmer’s Fridge brings to those places.”

The app is probably the least technologically interesting part about Farmer’s Fridge, but what it offers is an easy way to see where you can find a fridge, the inventory of said fridge and the ability to reserve food from that fridge ahead of time. The fridge itself is the real technological achievement. It’s an internet-connected device that runs firmware and features a graphical user interface and cloud infrastructure.

Next year, the plan is to expand regionally and launch in an additional region. In the nearer term, Farmer’s Fridge is expecting to grow from 130 employees today to about 200 by the end of next year.


News source

You might also like...

  • Snap introduces group video calls for up to 16 people 3 Apr, 2018
  • Microsoft acquires social learning platform Flipgrid 18 Jun, 2018
  • Workday acquires Rallyteam to fuel machine learning efforts 8 Jun, 2018
  • Monzo given go-ahead to ‘passport’ banking licence to Republic of Ireland 14 Feb, 2018
  • Previous story Meet 13 startups launching out of the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator
  • Next story Stripe is now valued at $20B after raising another $245M led by Tiger Global
  • RSS
    Receive Freebies & Latest Posts Directly To Your Email - it's Free!

    • Recent Posts
    • Most Popular
    • Comments
    • 7hrCggmJ-AMMeet the startups that pitched at EF’s 10th Demo Day in LondonSeptember 27, 2018
    • oNo38LV2tQIRally Rd., the app that lets you invest in classic cars, raises $7M Series ASeptember 27, 2018
    • Nearby.gifBerkanan is a Bluetooth-powered group messaging appSeptember 27, 2018
    • 2122.pngVinay Gupta to talk about Mattereum at Disrupt BerlinSeptember 27, 2018
    • slider_wp_03Best collection of WordPress Slider PluginsJuly 5, 2010
    • Joomla template builderTop 8 Free Joomla Template GeneratorsJuly 19, 2011
    • 40+ Best WordPress Plugins for Comments40+ Best WordPress Plugins for CommentsJune 18, 2011
    • wptheme2A Collection of Free WordPress ThemesJuly 11, 2010
    • Jason Hall on:Circle launches its stablecoin
    • Jason Hall on:Circle launches its stablecoin
    • Bharat Sarkari Naukri on:Spotify acquires online music studio Soundtrap as it goes after creators
    • PMP on:Online learning platform Unacademy gets $21M Series C from Sequoia India, SAIF and Nexus
  • Staff Picks

    • slider_wp_03Best collection of WordPress Slider PluginsJuly 5, 2010
    • Joomla template builderTop 8 Free Joomla Template GeneratorsJuly 19, 2011
    • 40+ Best WordPress Plugins for Comments40+ Best WordPress Plugins for CommentsJune 18, 2011
  • Recent Posts

    • Meet the startups that pitched at EF’s 10th Demo Day in London
    • Rally Rd., the app that lets you invest in classic cars, raises $7M Series A
  • Search Our Blog

  • Ulancer is an insightful freelance blog and resource site. We provide intuitive articles that cover Photoshop tutorials, time-saving management tips covering a broad range of topics. We also have an active freelance community forum, there you can meet other freelancers that share your common interest, socialize and chat about freelance trending news as the occurred.

© Copyright 2013 Ulancer.