The forthcoming app Grazin aims to provide consumers the local produce they want, whether it’s one tomato or 100.
After reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals in 2011, Tim Flores set out to reverse his years of unhealthy eating by going locavore and shedding 70 pounds.
“I was really unhealthy,” he says. “My life changed after reading that book.”
Now a farm-to-table evangelist, Flores believes that a diet of primarily locally produced food can reduce the girth of entire populations by helping them resolve the dilemma many face at the grocery store, and which Pollan laid out in his 450-page treatise: What to eat?
“The first supermarkets didn’t pop up until the 1940s,” says Flores, a 31-year-old software engineer-cum-entrepreneur. “Where did food come from before then? It came from a farm, and it was purchased from the farmer.”
Farmers will likely continue to grow produce well into the future, but Flores hopes the purchasing will be done through Grazin, his soon-to-launch virtual farmers’ market.
Flores and his two-person team of engineers began developing Grazin late last summer as a link between farmers and consumers. The app allows consumers to order produce from multiple farms. Orders are delivered to a network of regional hubs, where they are assembled by a Grazin rep and picked up by consumers.
“The concept is that everybody eats, so everyone is a potential Grazin customer,” Flores explains. “It’s based on the food system we had 70 years ago, where everything came from a within 50-mile radius.”
Unlike CSA (community-supported agriculture) farms, there are no subscription fees or shares to buy. “It’s like shopping on Amazon; you add produce to the cart and check out,” he says.
For this reason, some worry that Grazin has the potential to do to CSAs what the online bookseller did to local bookstores and what ride-sharing apps are doing to taxis.
“It really does threaten the food economy and supply chain,” says Claire Strader, an organic farming educator with FairShare Wisconsin, a coalition of 59 organic CSA farms. “CSAs are a very important way to get consumers access to organic produce.”
Under the CSA model, consumers purchase shares during the offseason, which provide farmers like Tricia Bross with the infusion of capital she needs to purchase seed stock and hire labor.
“It is assured money,” she says, on a recent Saturday at her stand at the Dane County Farmers’ Market on the Capitol Square. “Otherwise we wouldn’t know [how much money] was coming in week to week.”
In return, shareholders — depending on the type of share — receive a box of produce as often as once a week throughout the growing season. But CSAs have not been the remedy for all farming woes. Some consumers have spurned the model because of the uncertainty of what will be inside the box, which can include disliked or unwanted produce.
“With us you order exactly what you want,” Flores says. “You know exactly what you’re going to get every order.”
Flores expects Grazin will edge into the local food market by eliminating this uncertainty, in addition to allowing consumers to purchase from multiple farms, like at a farmers’ market, and to decide the quantity that is right for them.
In shifting uncertainty back onto the farm, Grazin’s success becomes more reliant on farmers themselves to deliver orders on time each week, regardless of whether it is just one tomato or 100.
To prevent farmers from feeling like mere FedEx drivers, Flores has turned to brick-and-mortar markets, like SuperCharge! Foods on East Washington Avenue, to give Grazin’s regional hubs a social component.
“I want every hub to be a place people want to go anyway,” he says. “SuperCharge is a fantastic location for hanging out for a little bit. This is a great thing for small businesses.”
While Flores, who collects a percentage of each order, aims to promote local produce — “We only make money if the farmers make money” — the potential siphoning off of CSA capital could, ironically, reduce access to such produce.
“CSAs are a big part of why there is more access to these products in stores and at farmers’ markets,” Strader explains. “Without CSAs, it is much harder to supply farmers’ markets and store shelves.”
Madison’s food economy, which has grown rapidly over the last decade, may have room for CSAs and new food-to-table apps to peacefully coexist. The wild card, of course, is consumers themselves. While the convenience Grazin provides is evident, the intangibles are not.
Like most apps, Grazin may help consumers cram more into their crowded lives, but a person’s diet, as Pollan notes in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, is as much about culture as convenience.
For many Madisonians, like Phibi Miller, patronizing the Dane County Farmers’ Market is a multigenerational tradition. “I have a lot of happy memories here,” she says. “My parents always brought me here. I love the smells of the bakery and being able to touch the produce.”
Miller also likes to inspect produce before purchasing. “One basket of strawberries might look better than the other.”
As with all new technologies, it is impossible to predict the novel ways they’ll be put to use or change people’s lives. But more than revolutionizing the local food economy, Grazin — and the competitor apps that are sure to follow — may only resemble innovation.
Flores’ main selling point — providing options to consumers on what to eat — cuts to the essence of the omnivore’s dilemma without advancing the cause, some say.
“These kinds of options don’t challenge consumers to try different kinds of foods, expand their palates or learn new cooking skills,” Strader says. “But from a consumer perspective, pick-and-choose is far more convenient.”
