Real Time Farms At last week’s Food Tech Meetup in NYC, I got the chance to learn more about a very cool food tech startup, called Real Time Farms, based in Ann Arbor Michigan. The premise behind the app is that we would like to know where our food comes from, all things being equal, and that restaurants and the producers of food have an incentive to pass that information along to us. Food transparency has a high value. The founder of Real Time Foods, Karl Rosaen, and his wife Cara Rosen, are aggressively growing the business with a growing team. I met Lindsay-Jean Hart at the event as well, another team member. The application provides the tools so that food can be made more accessible at every step in the food chain, from farm to our plate. The screenshot above (click to expand) shows several steps in the food chain: Zingerman’s Roadhouse, an Ann Arbor restaurant, is a client, and they source food from various farms and food artisans, shown along the right hand margin. This linkage between farms, food artisans, and restaurants means that you could potentially know where every bit of food at Zingerman’s comes from, and likewise for the Ann Arbor Tortilla Factory, where Zingerman’s gets tortillas. The team told me that they are at work on a lot of innovative new features, as well as launching an internship program that will lead to a more aggressive expansion, and adding more organizations to their rapidly expanding data set. The site can also be used to find local farmer’s markets, and their data set carries more detailed information than others programs, I was told. Bottom Line I am excited to see another polished tool focused on food tech. The execution is tight, the design is intuitive and pleasing, and the company’s plans are exciting. Like most geolocal applications, the map has to be fairly comprehensive to get users to use it or to come back, so the notion of fanning out ten dozen interns to get farms, artisans, restaurants, and farmer’s markets signed up is a good one, and a necessary precondition to general use.  In the meantime, Real Time Farms is moving ahead technically and operationally, heading toward a massive database of food and the connections between sources in the food chain, something we, as informed consumers, really need. I am looking forward to the day, in the not too distant future, where I will sit down at a NY noodle bar for lunch, and I will see Real Time Foods information inserted in the menu next to every dish, and reprinted on the check, as well.

Real Time Farms

At last week’s Food Tech Meetup in NYC, I got the chance to learn more about a very cool food tech startup, called Real Time Farms, based in Ann Arbor Michigan.

The premise behind the app is that we would like to know where our food comes from, all things being equal, and that restaurants and the producers of food have an incentive to pass that information along to us. Food transparency has a high value.

The founder of Real Time Foods, Karl Rosaen, and his wife Cara Rosen, are aggressively growing the business with a growing team. I met Lindsay-Jean Hart at the event as well, another team member.

The application provides the tools so that food can be made more accessible at every step in the food chain, from farm to our plate.

The screenshot above (click to expand) shows several steps in the food chain: Zingerman’s Roadhouse, an Ann Arbor restaurant, is a client, and they source food from various farms and food artisans, shown along the right hand margin. This linkage between farms, food artisans, and restaurants means that you could potentially know where every bit of food at Zingerman’s comes from, and likewise for the Ann Arbor Tortilla Factory, where Zingerman’s gets tortillas.

The team told me that they are at work on a lot of innovative new features, as well as launching an internship program that will lead to a more aggressive expansion, and adding more organizations to their rapidly expanding data set.

The site can also be used to find local farmer’s markets, and their data set carries more detailed information than others programs, I was told.

Bottom Line

I am excited to see another polished tool focused on food tech. The execution is tight, the design is intuitive and pleasing, and the company’s plans are exciting. Like most geolocal applications, the map has to be fairly comprehensive to get users to use it or to come back, so the notion of fanning out ten dozen interns to get farms, artisans, restaurants, and farmer’s markets signed up is a good one, and a necessary precondition to general use. 

In the meantime, Real Time Farms is moving ahead technically and operationally, heading toward a massive database of food and the connections between sources in the food chain, something we, as informed consumers, really need.

I am looking forward to the day, in the not too distant future, where I will sit down at a NY noodle bar for lunch, and I will see Real Time Foods information inserted in the menu next to every dish, and reprinted on the check, as well.

21 February 2011 20 underpaidgenius
food techreal time farmsfood chainsfood tech meetupfood safetyfood chain visibilityfood transparency

Notes

  1. mauricesmall reblogged this from underpaidgenius
  2. dhgisme reblogged this from stoweboyd
  3. culturemodding reblogged this from stoweboyd and added:
    Still early days...this, feels like, but promising
  4. kthread reblogged this from stoweboyd
  5. stoweboyd reblogged this from underpaidgenius and added:
    Food transparency has a high value.
  6. underpaidgenius posted this

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  • What Drives Us? | A draft chapter of my book, discussing motivations, Maslow's hierarchy, and fluidarity.

  • Socialogy: Interview With John Hagel | I Speak with Joh Hagel about the innovation at the edge.

  • Complex organisation arises from webs of interaction among causal factors | So, it turns out that DNA is, in fact, a great metaphor for business culture, but only after you realize that DNA is not a few hundred off-on switches, but instead a universe of unknowable complexities, that we can interact with, and understand at some abstract cartoonish level, but not control, and never fully comprehend.

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  • Innovators Get Better With Age | Companies make a mistake by relying too much on the innoations of the young, because Nobel laureats don't come into their prime until their 50s.

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  • Infodemics | 2009 | Passing incomplete or inaccurate information about some risk event can make people take actions that increase the damage of the event itself.

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