When Matthew Tortora was searching for fresh, local ingredients as a chef at the now-defunct Fish restaurant in Jamestown, he became frustrated by the inaccessibility of homegrown sources. That gave him an idea for a business.
What he came up with was an online marketplace connecting buyers with local farmers, fishermen and other vendors. His startup company, called Crave Food Services Corp., developed the marketplace WhatsGood in 2014 strictly as an online entity and it became a hit.
Now WhatsGood has gone brick and mortar.
Tortora, who co-founded the Warwick-based business, and is a culinary graduate of Johnson & Wales University, said the mission of the operation – whether online or in a brick-and-mortar store – is connecting communities with the people growing their food.
It was a problem he encountered as a chef, with a schedule that required him to work until 2 a.m. and then return at 10 a.m., leaving little time to procure ingredients for his dishes.
Tortora said WhatsGood solved the problem for him and others, improving accessibility while also offering a free delivery service.
During the pandemic, the company’s online offerings in Chicago were so popular that WhatsGood grew from about 2,000 to 30,000 customers. So in early December, the company opened its first WhatsGood Farm Shop, a combination retail and warehouse store, in Chicago – the first of what Tortora said he hopes will be more in the area.
“This is just a pilot concept store,” he said. “We want to see how it works there, to help us understand how it will work here in New England.”
‘It’s quite a leap for a rapid delivery startup.’
TESS BOOTH, University of Rhode Island supply chain management lecturer
Such a move makes Crave Food Services a rarity, according to Tess Booth, supply chain management lecturer at the University of Rhode Island.
While Booth says large online retailers such as Amazon.com Inc. are expanding into the realm of physical locations because of their high name recognition, most smaller online platforms haven’t taken that route, particularly with the COVID-19 pandemic pushing many retailers to focus more on digital sales.
“It’s quite a leap for a rapid delivery startup,” she said. “I don’t see it as a large, growing trend from a startup perspective, but [WhatsGood] seems to be mirroring what large online marketplaces are thinking about what consumers are going to want in the future.”
The catalyst to move to physical locations involves a vendor’s uncertainty about the consumer base, she said. The sellers are local and accustomed to being able to sell products face to face with those in the community.
A WhatsGood Farm Shop retail establishment will improve the confidence of sellers in the marketplace and likely attract more vendors, growing the business. “They’re creating a permanent farmers market,” Booth said.
Also, Booth said, the WhatsGood business model could help solve the supply chain issues that are plaguing other industries.
Booth said that use of this type of platform might have benefited fishermen in Narragansett’s Port of Galilee during the early days of the pandemic when they could not sell their fish because local restaurants were closed.
“This would have been a wonderful outlet to fuel the sales of the inventory that they had,” she said.
As for how WhatsGood will fare with its retail shop in Chicago, Booth said that she thinks it will be successful due to the consumer base buying local food daily where it doesn’t need to purchase in bulk. It is something that she believes will appeal to consumers in New England.
“It’s a convenience factor for the consumer market they are targeting,” she said. “The goal is to know where your food is coming from and support local sellers.”
Tortora said the Chicago market, due to its population of about 10 million people, offers a safe, logical environment for testing its new business model. The city also lacks winter farmers markets, which were shuttered due to the pandemic.
Another benefit is that local sellers can earn two to three times the revenue they collect from spending all day at a farmers market, due to the company’s hybrid delivery and retail shop platform, Tortora said.
WhatsGood is now mapping out locations in New England for potential farm shops, as the company eyes expansion. The hope is to open a retail store locally in the coming year, he said.
Tortora said the business will not be franchised at this point, and its delivery service is self-run and not outsourced to Uber or DoorDash.
When the company was exploring expansion into retail, it did not have a business model to reference, he said. The closest operations are Amazon Fresh Stores, Uber and DoorDash, which is opening stores in New York.
“I think you’re going to start to see this type of business model,” he said. “There are rapid delivery startups that are opening their own retail locations. So, I do think it’s something you are going to see a lot more of.”
Cassius Shuman is a PBN staff writer. Email him at Shuman@PBN.com.