Oregon Startups Solving F&B Logistics Problems

As Walmart, Amazon, and other e-giants battle for dominance in the online grocery wars, a growing number of tech-enabled startups are taking a different tactic, aiming to disrupt the conventional food supply chain by using logistics platforms to connect shoppers directly with local farmers and producers.

Portland-based MilkRun, for example, seeks to make buying from small eco-friendly farmers as easy as shopping from Amazon. Its online marketplace features around 100 Oregon producers who sell everything from eggs from pasture-raised chickens and grass-fed beef to locally roasted coffee and handmade noodles.

While MilkRun puzzles through the logistics, another Oregon startup, All The Farms, is building a complementary business, mining and collating farm data to connect producers and consumers. Set to launch Sept. 23 in 10 major cities, the Eugene-based company provides a website featuring small farms within easy access to the user’s address.

“We’re taking all those farms with hard-to-capture data because they are hard to follow, don’t have marketing budgets and don’t have relationships with Whole Foods,” said CEO and co-founder Jim Cupples. “We then aggregate and standardize that data.”

News sourced from Freightwaves.com