Growing up, JA Kernodle never broke a bone—a fact he jokingly credits to his mother’s freezer having been stocked with locally sourced raw milk.
Kernodle said his mother was always adamant that the family had a relationship with their food. This meant knowing the farmers they were purchasing from and even extended to regularly visiting the farms.
“When I got to an age that I wanted to purchase from farms on my own, I realized it was pretty difficult to do so,” he said. “It’s kind of like more relationship building.”
Fortunately, Kernodle had the tools he needed to find a simpler solution, having been an iOS developer for a while. At the age of 12, he launched his first app. The soundbox application garnered half a million downloads and briefly appeared at the top of the entertainment section in the App Store.
He used this iOS development experience to create Locally Grown, an app that helps consumers in North Carolina buy produce directly from nearby farmers. Representing the startup sprouting from this app, Kernodle recently participated in the Andrews Launch Accelerator, a program that provides guidance and grants to NC State founders. (GrepBeat has also written about the startup’s fellow ALA cohort members, Alpacasews and Modi.)
Connecting Farmers To Consumers
Locally Grown aims to help make it easier for farmers to sell food while also making products more accessible to those who want to focus on their health and build a connection with their food.
Kernodle said the biggest problem for direct-to-consumer farmers is that they don’t really want to be digital marketers. While he said it is necessary for them to be active on social media, it’s not something many farmers enjoy.
Locally Grown addresses this problem by marketing for farmers to their consumer base. There are already 60 participating farms, with 25,000 app downloads across North Carolina.
Many other direct-to-consumer farm ordering apps, Kernodle said, have attempted to create a system similar to Uber Eats. Yet wide-scale logistics for such a network are too variable to properly scale.
Currently, the app’s biggest competitor is called Barn2Door. This business works with direct-to-consumer farmers in all 50 states. However, it is also quite costly: Prices for farmers to create an account start at $85 a month.
“It’s not actually a two-sided marketplace,” Kernodle said. “They don’t have consumers living on their platform. It purely just kind of creates a sales website for farmers.”
Locally Grown recognizes that consumer demand for healthy, local products exceeds the supply of direct-to-consumer farms. Kernodle said this knowledge led him to the belief that his startup should monetize consumers and not farmers.
The key difference between Locally Grown and Barn2Door, he said, is that shoppers are charged a transaction fee—driving more sales to farmers.
“Total, the farmer gets charged nothing for using our platform,” Kernodle said. “We’re just looking for really quality direct-to-consumer farms that will leave a good impression on our customers.”
QUICK BITS
Startup: Locally Grown
Founder: JA Kernodle (Founding Engineer)
Founded: 2023
Location: Raleigh
Website: locallygrown.app
Funding: Bootstrapped
To this point, Locally Grown has been bootstrapped by Kernodle. He said they are currently in the running for the USDA Farmers Market Promotion Program, which helps increase the availability of locally sourced produce by supporting direct-to-consumer markets. If awarded the grant, Kernodle hopes to hire a head of product to help manage farmer relationships and grow the platform.
Locally Grown also plans to launch a significant improvement to the platform this month. After rounds of customer discovery interviews and conversations with farm partners, Kernodle said they found that farmers want the ability to accept payments on their mobile phones through the app.
A new tap-to-pay system will enable farmers to accept in-person payments directly through Locally Grown. Since credit cards charge less for in-person payments, Kernodle said this will also allow Locally Grown to lower transaction fees.
“I think it has the significant chance of more than doubling our transaction volume through our software,” he said of the change.
Kernodle invites those interested in purchasing from Locally Grown to use code GREPBEAT for 20% off all orders on the app.
