An interview with Ben Patten and Danny Blackman, founders of Good Club, one of Forward Fooding’s top 500 Food Tech startups.

Ben Patten and Danny Blackman, founders of Good Club

It’s time to put a face to the name…

We asked our FoodTech 500 top-runners to give us a bit of insight into how they started out as a company and their thoughts on the role of technology in Food industry. Meet Ben and Danny, the power-duo behind Good Club, an online grocer making sustainable living accessible to a broader audience. Let’s see what they had to say.

So tell us a little bit more about you! Where did the idea for your FoodTech company come from?

Ben: It’s not my first, I was one of the founders of Farmdrop. My passion is food and I have been working around food and sustainability for over 15 years. The idea for Good Club came when I was at Farmdrop. We worked with a wholesaler who explained how they allowed groups of households to order direct. I started buying my staples like this and became obsessed with how different operational models could make sustainable products more accessible.  As we started to grow our customers challenged us to go one step further and we are now trialing the future of the business, a closed-loop system where delivery boxes and product containers get reused.

How is tech central to your business?

Danny: 10 years ago it was not possible to target grocery customers on anything other than their geographic location. Two simple changes: the rise of social media provides access to audiences based on detailed values and demographic markers. The increase in e-commerce has created a number of delivery couriers that make it easy and affordable to reach customers in any location.

As a result, we can build a big customer base for products made to specific standards (in our case, sustainability) for a specific shopping mission.

Tech also enables our operational efficiencies and business model, allowing us to integrate seamlessly with partners, identify bottlenecks, reduce costs and respond swiftly to any issues.

Culturally, it is ingrained in everything we do. We can monitor every aspect of the customer’s journey, online and offline, to make incremental improvements every day, giving us an advantage in how we acquire and retain customers.

Why do you think it’s important to see the food industry embrace tech?

Ben and Danny: Technology has transformed every part of the value chain; production, operations, and the customer interface. For new and old food industry players their product(s) or service has to be understood and (re)designed in the context of what the digital dimension offers. You cannot compete in the future without doing so.

Want to know more? Check out Good Club’s full profile here.

Congratulations again to Good Club for ranking 8th in the “Consumer Apps & Services” category of the Foodtech 500 list.

To find out who else made it into the FoodTech 500; the top Food Tech companies in the world, click here.

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