Exclusive: Farmigo sells its Bay Area operation after July’s surprise shutdown

“I kind of expected Benzi to pick one of those companies,” Herbert said. Neither she nor Ronen would discuss terms of the sale. Herbert is backed by a single financier, Cienega Capital of Paicines, Calif.

Ronen said Farmigo “reached out to a bunch of companies to find partners” and is “in discussions with everybody” to unload operations in the company’s other regions: New York/New Jersey and Seattle/Tacoma. He chose Eating With the Seasons, he said, in part because its service is similar to Farmigo’s. It delivers food from local suppliers to pick-up points managed by volunteers. Ronen also cited the fact that Eating with The Seasons was among the first customers of Farmigo’s back-end platform, CSA Software Management, which the company is now solely focused on. “Becky helped us get started,” Ronen said. He declined to comment in specifics on what might happen with Farmigo’s other markets. Herbert said she would continue using that platform.

The abruptness of Farmigo’s departure from the delivery business caused some speculation on social media and elsewhere that an investor had pulled out, perhaps spooked by the troubles at Good Eggs and elsewhere as competitors have piled into a friction-filled business that has proved to be more challenging than many—including, by his own admission, Ronen—had anticipated. But Ronen denies losing any financiers. “Our investors were fully supportive of us continuing,” he said. Pulling out “wasn’t for lack of financing.”

In his July announcement, Ronen wrote that Farmigo could “no longer continue our community delivery operations sustainably.” Later, he told Food+Tech Connect that Farmigo is “great at building software to solve problems, but we don’t think we’re great at building logistics to solve problems.”

Herbert says an official announcement of the sale is coming next week. Eating with The Seasons will be renamed Farmhouse Foods, and “Eating with the Seasons” will be the company’s motto (the logo has already been changed on its website). Much of that company’s business overlaps regionally with Farmigo’s former operations in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, but she’ll be adding lots of new territory, including Marin and Contra Costa counties, to the north and east of San Francisco.

Surprisingly to Herbert, however, adding Farmigo’s operations to her own will only double the size of the business, from about 1,000 weekly deliveries to about 2,000. Farmigo’s business in the Bay Area was much smaller than Herbert had realized. Ronen would not confirm whether that number is correct, saying “that’s Becky’s business now.”