0820_AUG Comstock's Magazine 0820 August | Page 56

FOOD
Farm Fresh
To You
Roughly 700 local food products, including Bosworth’s
rice, are sold through Farm Fresh To You as
add-ons to produce boxes from its own farm and
others. Before the pandemic, Farm Fresh To You delivered
organic produce to more than 30,000 homes
throughout California every week, but add-ons only
accounted for 10 percent of sales. At the beginning
of the lockdown order, that number jumped by tens
of thousands, according to the company, and the
spike in demand for add-ons like milk, eggs and
meats skyrocketed to 30 percent of business.
“Overnight, people buying those items grew by
orders of magnitude, and so we were stuck scrambling,”
says Thaddeus Barsotti, co-CEO of Farm
Fresh To You. The company needed to secure more
eggs, solidify relationships with its dairy contacts,
reconfigure its packaging and fulfillment processes,
and improve its online technology to accommodate
the growth, he says.
But some products in high demand caused
challenges that couldn’t be resolved through
relationships. When Farm Fresh To You sold out of
butter, Barsotti’s supplier told him it had run out of
packaging material. “It’s not that there’s no butter,”
says Barsotti. “They went through two years of
cardboard to pack it in.” Eggs destined for restaurants
that were rerouted to retail markets suddenly
required 12-count cartons, rather than 30-count
flats. For numerous products, manufacturers simply
couldn’t produce packaging quickly enough to
keep up with demand.
Barsotti hopes the ability of companies like his
to quickly adapt to upheavals in markets will build
support for alternative food networks. “I’m cautiously
optimistic some of that’s going to stick, and people
are going to begin to look at who they buy their food
from and (will) want to be a little bit closer to the
supply — the actual supplier — than, say, a retail
chain is normally,” says Barsotti.
56 comstocksmag.com | August 2020