Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

Good Eggs Nabs $8.5 Million from Sequoia and Others for Local Farm-to-Fridge Effort (Video)

Good Eggs, the local farm-to-fridge local grocery delivery startup, has nabbed $8.5 million in funding from Sequoia Capital, which it will use to expand its sustainable food service to more cities.

Currently — with 80 employees and 350 local food vendors on its platform — the San Francisco-based company is operating in the Bay Area, as well as Brooklyn, Los Angeles and New Orleans.

The Series A funding was led by Sequoia Capital, with partner Bryan Schreier joining the board. In addition, Harrison Metal and others — including Baseline Ventures, Collaborative Fund, Kapor Capital and angel investors such as Max Ventilla — will also invest in the new round.

While there are a lot of such services out there, Good Eggs is a really interesting play in e-commerce, trying to complete the link in the food delivery chain for those interested in organic or locally sourced products.

It uses handsome photos, offers lots of food vendors and farmer info and has a pretty slick online ordering method that is then fulfilled for consumers at its warehouses. Vendors know exactly how much to drop off daily, rather than Good Eggs having to hold inventory.

While Google and Amazon are deep-diving into the arena, as well as local supermarket chains, Good Eggs is aiming more to compete with local farmers markets, Community Supported Agriculture programs that link consumers with local farms and tonier chains such as Whole Foods.

Prices at Good Eggs, said its co-founder Rob Spiro, are about 10 percent less than Whole Foods and is focused on providing convenience to its urban-targeted audience. Customers of the service can either have their order delivered to their home for a fee or meet a Good Eggs truck at various central spots in cities.

In the Silicon Valley area, of course, the company vans are in the parking lots of companies like Google and Facebook.

Local delivery is a tough market, but Spiro is an interesting entrepreneur. He co-founded the Aardvark social search startup with Ventilla and others, which was later sold to Google in 2010 (and then closed down in 2011). He actually left the search giant before that and decided to focus on sustainable food — largely because he worked on a family farm earlier in his life.

Here’s my video interview with Spiro (who cleverly also fed me some tasty organic fare):

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There’s a lot of attention and PR around Marissa, but their product lineup just kind of blows.

— Om Malik on Bloomberg TV, talking about Yahoo, the September issue of Vogue Magazine, and our overdependence on Google