Building for local food
since 2020

FreshFind was founded in 2020 by Michael and James in Toronto, out of a COVID-19 relief hackathon organized by the City of Innisfil in partnership with Techstars and DMZ. The moment that sparked it was visible to anyone who walked into a grocery store that spring: shelves were empty, farmers markets were closed, and the local farms and food makers who could have helped were completely unreachable — because almost none of them had any digital presence at all. Local food distribution is genuinely hard, which is exactly why grocery stores and farmers markets are so essential to communities. When both went down at once, the gap was stark. We built the first version of FreshFind to bridge it, then kept going.

Over the following years the platform evolved substantially. A tool for one market became a multi-market platform. The multi-market platform added direct-to-consumer eCommerce. That grew into a marketplace aggregating products from all our vendors, so customers could find and buy from whoever was convenient. We then moved away from the marketplace model and connected businesses with the tools they were already using — Shopify, Square, Facebook Marketplace, Instagram and TikTok Shops. Each iteration taught us something real about what local food businesses actually need.

Along the way we worked with businesses across Canada, the United States, Latin America, and Europe. Some were selling their very first box of produce. Others were growing from a handful of customers into brands with national reach, and we helped wire up the digital systems and integrations that made scaling possible without adding complexity they couldn’t manage.

There was a period when we had a chance at something much bigger — a deal that looked transformational on paper. We walked away because it didn’t feel right. That decision was hard, but it was clarifying. It helped us understand what we actually wanted to build and who we most wanted to help.

What we’ve learned after five years is that every local food business is different. A CSA farm has completely different needs from a farmers market operator, which has different needs from a food truck, which has different needs from an artisan food maker trying to sell wholesale. There is no one platform that fits all of them well. What they all need is someone who understands their world, knows the tools, and can build something that actually works for them — without asking them to take on systems they can’t maintain.