Good Eggs’ closure was a ‘complete shock’

Food and meal delivery has been a high-growth business for some time. The sudden announcement of the closure of Good Eggs this month was one of the first major notable failures in the industry.
“The Good Eggs news came as a complete shock,” Michael Robinov, of South Williamsburg-based Farm to People, said last week.
For the last two years, Farm to People has been eking out a market niche by being a sort of Etsy for food.
This summer it announced a partnership with Quinciple, another farm-to-consumer brand. The company puts together boxes of organically-grown food available for purchase or subscription, and also serves as a marketplace for individual sellers to list their goods on the site.

Happy Easter! May you all have an EGGS-cellent day!

A photo posted by Farm To People (@farmtopeople) on Apr 5, 2015 at 9:54am PDT

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This is not so different from what industry leader Good Eggs did, too. But Farm to People’s Robinov was confident this week that his company’s business model was substantially different — and better placed in the market.
“While we really have the same missions and we want to see these farmers and producers thrive, our business model is very different from Good Eggs,” Robinov wrote in an email. “We are not an ‘everything’ store for local food. Rather, we hope that, through our direct relationships with farmers, we can deliver a Farm to People/Quinciple-curated farmers’ box subscription.”
The main reason Good Eggs closed was one of tremendously complicated logistics, according to its CEO, Rob Spiro.
“What we didn’t fully understand when we started was that we were creating a new category that required a different approach to supply chains, logistics, and commerce — all of the pieces of getting food from local producers to the kitchens of our customers,” he wrote on the company’s blog.
Robinov, who is in his early 20s, founded Farm to People with his father, David Robinov. The two are bullish on the logistics of Farm to People, despite his shock at Good Eggs’ closing.
“Since Good Eggs’ closure in NYC, it is more important than ever to support the local food movement and we hope that we can fill the logistics need for getting these exceptional products from farms and makers to people,” Robinov wrote.