What I Do: Noah Offenkrantz, CEO of Find Your Farmer

Find Your Farmer is an online grocery store and delivery service sourcing products from local, ethical farms and artisans. CEO Noah Offenkrantz has a sense of humor about his lofty job title: “It’s kind of a fake title, to be completely honest,” he said, laughing. “I wear a lot of hats, and I go by CEO primarily because I’m the main one kind of directing the trajectory of the company, where we’re heading and what vision we’re striving for.” Here, Offenkrantz details what that vision entails and his many hats at Find Your Farmer.

“Our basic premise is: People order through our platform, the farms and artisans deliver to us, and then we deliver it to different households in St. Louis.”

“We have a delivery day, which is Wednesday, and people order throughout the week up until Monday at noon. Then we send out basically all of our orders to farms and artisans, they deliver to our facility on Tuesday, and we sort everything into insulated cooler bags and be the last mile of delivery.”

“On a week-to-week basis, I have a lot of different responsibilities. I’m the one that’s communicating with different farms and artisans, basically figuring out what products they have on a weekly basis, which products are no longer available and then updating the site accordingly.” 

“I do all the pictures and descriptions for the site and help with the website design. I do the social media outreach. I do on-boarding of new vendors, finding different farms and artisans that match what we’re looking for in people, which is sustainability, being local, having extremely strong commitment to quality, having just awesome, delicious products.”

“On a weekly basis, I’m also sorting produce and doing the last mile delivery, cleaning our bags and cleaning our facility alongside Spencer Stewart, one of the other co-founders. All the outreach to different publications and different organic marketing; we go door-to-door.”

“Every week we’re onboarding one to two new vendors, building out our products on our site. I’m really excited, we’re going to have Katie’s Pizza on the site soon, and we’re going to have Hungry Planet.”

“There are a lot of different definitions of local. Some people have defined a local food shed as 150 miles, some people define it as 300 miles. We try to source everything from within Missouri and Illinois, except for when it’s not available, and then we’ll look elsewhere.”

“We definitely are looking for sustainability in our farmers. But the big thing for us is really transparency and trying to ensure that the people of St. Louis really know how their food is being produced.” 

“I think it’s just so crazy that we continue to rely on this grocery store model where you just have no idea where the produce is coming from, you have no idea who is the person behind it, you have no idea of the practices that were used.”

“I love the people on both sides. I love working with farmers and artisans. It’s really a partnership, because we wouldn’t be able to do what we do if they weren’t there. And obviously, we’re helping to move their products a little bit. And I love that dynamic. I love reaching out to new people and developing our sourcing strategy.”

“I also love the customers. We have just the absolutely the best customer base. … I just love delivering to someone and seeing them at the door.”