Marcie Jimenez was having a bad week. Her hard drive went down, there were problems at her house, and the phone line went out. Then on Wednesday, August 5, she received an unexpected email from the CEO of Good Eggs, an online farmer’s market that delivered produce and baked goods from her Santa Ynez Valley farm to customers’ homes in Los Angeles. The email told her that Friday would be the final day of the service. Good Eggs was shutting down its Los Angeles operation. “I was in tears, I was so overwhelmed,” she recalls. “I couldn’t believe it.”
Good Eggs Downsizing Leaves Farmers, Vendors Scrambling
The company scaled back its efforts to deliver farmers market fare to consumers, leaving some small food makers and growers in the lurch.
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News of Good Eggs’ closure made headlines the same day. After raising nearly $53 million in funding from big-name investors like Index Ventures and Sequoia, the San Francisco-based company revealed its plans to cease operations in its newest markets: Los Angeles, Brooklyn, and New Orleans. They would once again operate only in San Francisco, and with a smaller home-team staff to boot.
Of course, many people are impacted any time a company closes, from customers to vendors to employees. But with Good Eggs, it seems that the closure may well have an outsized impact on the very people the company meant to empower — small, local food makers and growers.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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