AgLocal opened a private beta for 20 notable chefs in New York City last week, including “Top Chef” winner Harold Dieterle (above).
After more than a year in development and a seed round of $1.5 million, AgLocal last week launched into private beta with 20 notable New York City chefs.
The Kansas City area startup aims to improve its restaurant industry offering as it recruits top-tier chefs from the coasts—San Francisco is next—to test its “farm-to-fork” online marketplace for local and sustainable meat. Among its early user list is “Top Chef” winner Harold Dieterle of The Marrow and New York Times best-selling author Eddie Huang of Baohaus, customers who have already helped the startup gain exposure.
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It hopes to build on that exposure as it launches with 20 chefs in San Francisco in the coming weeks, and after that, open up to 20 more in New York City and again in San Francisco, respectively.
“What we realized is, ‘If we can capture 20 percent of the top chefs in the country for all the cities that we’re in, the entire market of these other high-end chefs will follow suit,’” Robert Roderick, head of product and marketing, said Friday. The plan is to continue extending invites in other large markets to gain feedback.
AgLocal’s marketplace aims to offer transparency and transactions through the entire meat-buying process: profiles on chefs and farms, real-time inventory for purchasers, quality checks at farms and a payment system for vendors.
The startup’s ability to get its foot in the door of the restaurant community was a result of its investor Pat LaFreida (right), who saw sustainable and local meat as the future. LaFrieda supplies the top chefs in NYC, so when he reached out to AgLocal, everyone bought in.
“He had to build a whole separate business unit at LaFrieda to be able to integrate AgLocal,” Roderick said.
Its early relationships are essential to its growth, Roderick said, so AgLocal has stationed two representatives—one to work with restaurants, another with farms—in NYC, and the same approach will be taken with San Francisco. In order to cover customer service needs at all hours, the startup is stationing representatives in Kansas City for the time advantage on both coasts, founder and CEO Naithan Jones said Friday in an email.
“The restaurant industry is used to having someone they can contact, which is why we felt we had to have someone available to them at all times,” Roderick said, noting AgLocal plans to add multiple representives in Kansas City over the next year to coincide with new markets.
As it expands geographically, AgLocal also is working on ways to beef up its software and services.
To combat the industry’s time wasted using paper invoices and checks, AgLocal provides its own invoicing feature that offers Dwolla as an option. The use of the Des Moines-based payment network has cut wait times for payment from 2-6 weeks to 2-5 business days, Roderick said.
AgLocal is also in the process of building an analytics system that finds matches to sell an entire animal instead of only high-grade meat and provides plate prices so chefs can order more efficiently to maximize profits.
“There’s no way we can compete on price with commodity meat, so we’re trying to give more free software just for ordering off the platform, give them more marketing from profiles,” Roderick said.
In August, AgLocal closed a $1.5 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Kansas City, Mo.-based OpenAir Equity Partners. The startup anticipates its next round of funding will come in the next couple months.
Since we last reported on AgLocal, its co-founder Jacob McDaniel left his role as creative director in the startup’s San Francisco office and has returned to Kansas City to pursue building his web design and development company &Pixels. He will remain co-founder and continue in an advisory role at AgLocal, according to a blog post.
Credits: Screenshots from aglocal.com. Pat LaFrieda photo from twitter.com.
