We don't have to look for food so much anymore; However, not only do people enjoy digging up wild mushrooms and other foods, but consumers are also equally excited to eat them. In this environment it appears Foraged, a marketplace for purchasing wild and specialty foods from independent foragers and farmers.
Mushrooms are big business: Companies like Smallhold and Adapt AgTech bring a vertical farming approach to mushroom cultivation. Others, including Meati Foods and Fable Food, turn mushrooms into meat alternatives, while MycoWorks creates leather replacements from them.
Jack Hamrick and Andy Conner founded Foraged in 2021 to address rising food prices and supply chain disruptions and help small business owners get a piece of the world mushroom market which is expected to be valued at $127 billion by 2030.
“We are growing, not despite economic fears and inflationary pressures, but because of the challenges,” Hamrick said. “We allow consumers to buy food directly from family-owned businesses, rather than multinational corporations chasing the margin. By eliminating nearly the entire supply chain, consumers save money and small businesses grow. “We are still seeing big tailwinds for consumers because people want to eat differently and they want truly natural, healthy, sustainable and unique foods, and that is what Foraged unlocks.”
In 2022, Foraged launched a $200.000 pre-seed round that included investors such as celebrity chef and restaurateur Tom Colicchio. At that time, hundreds of people registered to sell items and more than 500 customers were making purchases.
The company vets its suppliers and offers them a mobile app that manages the entire e-commerce experience, from product listing to payments, shipping, and local pickups.
A year later, the site has tens of thousands of new customers and the number of repeat customers has increased more than 1000%. Additionally, the company has experienced more than 400% revenue growth from customers in the United States and Puerto Rico.
In addition to mushrooms and specialty products such as honey, oils and jams, Foraged's market has grown to include eggs, meat, dairy and seafood.
“We recently started eating meat and seafood for the first time a few months ago,” Hamrick said. “Now we have everything from wild cod to lobster, arriving to dips by order: the supplier sends a message, 'thanks for the order, I'm going to put on the wetsuit'.”
All of that has attracted even more investors who recently pumped $2.7 million in seed funding into Foraged. Bessemer Venture Partners led the round and was joined by Yelp co-founder and CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, StubHub co-founder Eric Baker, Shopify president Harley Finkelstein, and Fiverr founder and CEO Micha Kaufman. In total, the company has raised $3 million.
Hamrick intends to deploy the new capital into creating additional tools and features for sellers and buyers. Foraged has eight full-time employees, including a Michelin-starred Noma chef, and hopes to add more engineers.
“We have some exciting product announcements lined up, and we're finally doing some marketing,” Hamrick said. “No other technology company is doing this, much less in a platform market setting, and being able to marry those tools that are not addressed in the market right now, with the network that we have already established in the market, There is a great path unlocked to success.”
