Forget about your supermarket and buy directly from your local farmers and foodmakers. French startup La Ruche qui dit oui (also known as The Food Assembly in the U.K.) has been making waves in its home country for a while now. But it seems like international investors also got the word as Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures and Frédéric Court from Felix Capital are leading a $9 million Series B round (€8 million) in the food startup, with XAnge and Quadia also participating. This startup is fascinating for many reasons — La Ruche may have found the most efficient business model when it comes to building a food startup.
“Last year, we launched in the U.K., Germany, Spain and Italy. This round means that we need to solidify our existing markets,” co-founder and CEO Marc-David Choukroun told me. “We need to go faster when it comes to our innovation power.”
Here’s how La Ruche works. There are hundreds of ruches in many different places in France. You first need to find your local “ruche” on the company’s website and sign up to the newsletter. Every week, the ruche manager will send you an email and tell you what you can buy this week. Local foodmakers then come and sell directly their goods to the end consumers in your city. It’s a great way to talk with your neighbors and local farmers.
And this is key to understanding La Ruche’s early success. The company only provides a marketplace, which is a major advantage for everyone. First, local farmers get over 80 percent for every product sold, which is around four times better than what they could get from a supermarket chain. Similarly, these foodmakers set their own prices, meaning that it doesn’t need to be a race to the bottom anymore. At the same time, because they keep most of the proceedings of a purchase, they can set competitive prices as well.
Second, La Ruche doesn’t manage directly these local communities. Ruche managers are independent contractors who probably already know their way around local food and want to take advantage of the startup’s platform. These managers get an 8.35 percent cut on every transaction, and, according to an internal survey, 40 percent of them would like to work on their ruches full time.
Finally, La Ruche sits happily in this service provider position, providing the technology, brand and network to help local farmers get a fairer price and provide healthy food to more people. The company keeps an 8.35 cut as well.
Overall, only 70 people are working for La Ruche, with 15 people working on product design and development right now. “We only need 3 or 4 people to manage a network of 100 to 200 ruches,” Choukroun said. When you look at all the 600 ruches available in France, you can’t help but think that this model is ultra scalable.
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