Joe Blunda (Forager): The intersection of local food and technology [Episode 8]
Joe Blunda, CEO of Forager, digs into how Covid-19 has created a once in a generation reset around American food culture. People are rethinking their relationship to who provides their food in a time of crisis. The result? A spike in demand for local food. With restaurants and schools shuttered during the Covid crisis, grocers have been struggling to keep up. Forager is using technology to solve grocers’ challenges and get local food on the shelves.
Joe shares new data on how consumers are paying ever more attention to the health, justice, and environmental problems around food. We hear Joe’s analysis of how local food meets this cross-section of needs, and how to meet consumers where they are: in the virtual or physical grocery aisle.
Joe lays out how getting local food into wholesale channels is a critical driver of farm success. This is more important than ever when our primary means of getting local food— farmer's markets, restaurants, schools—are closed or operating in extreme uncertainty. Joe unpacks the key problems for grocers: lack of flex in the supply chain, tight margins, and price compression. We’re buckling down on how technology is helping make local foods competitive with the large industrial food chain.
Joe traces his roots as an entrepreneur to a childhood gig selling blueberries on the roadside in Maine. This seeded a passion for business, and for food. From his work outside the world of food and agriculture, Joe shares his perspective on the fragmentation and low levels of tech adoption in the world of food, and how this might be shifting. We’re exploring how to use this time of crisis to draw attention to food access, justice, and equality, and making sure consumers understand what foods are best and why.
Join the conversation on change management in the world’s largest and oldest business—food.