E1006: Farmer’s Fridge CEO & Founder Luke Saunders is creating a connected network of vending machines offering fresh & healthy meals, shares insights on creating a restaurant-like experience, solving food-supply chain issues, capitalizing on grassroots marketing & real-world virality & using sales

This Week in Startups

Jason Calacanis

Technology

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 3 December 2019

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

0:44 Jason intros Luke and describes how he found out about Farmer's Fridge
5:01 How did Luke overcome barriers of making a vending machine feel like a restaurant
9:18 Luke's life before Farmer's Fridge
11:52 How Luke discovered the issues of distribution that led to Farmer's Fridge
16:18 Building the first Farmer's Fridge vending machine
23:48 Ideal locations for Farmer's Fridge machines & where the first machine was placed
29:35 How did Farmer's Fridge begin to expand and hit critical mass
34:22 Using sales data to craft the most appealing menu
37:00 Getting VCs interested
41:57 Who was the first bold VC to put $ in? How did they prove themselves to institutional firms?
46:27 Machine cost over time & maximizing inventory
49:56 How hardships made Luke fearless
51:30 "Startup cannibalism"??? & low-burn culture
54:27 Farmer's Fridge NYC expansion
58:27 How does Farmer's Fridge compare to fast-casual salad restaurants

Transcript

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0:44.0	Hey everybody, welcome to this week and startups today on the program.
0:47.0	I have a founder who is in the vending machine space and you're like how really
0:51.0	vending machines like Coca-Cola no this vending machine I ran
0:55.6	into at an airport and I walked by it had a beautiful display and it was showing this
1:01.6	incredible farm-fresh produce, eggs, chicken, and I said,
1:07.0	wow, this looks like the future, let me go check this machine out.
1:09.0	And there were two or three people kind of not using it, but trying to figure it out and it was a standard vending
1:16.0	machine looked a little different than a Coca-Cola one who said a big
1:18.8	beautiful screen on it and I tried it and it was amazing and the name of that machine is farmer's fridge you can go take a look at
1:26.6	farmers fridge.com and the name of that founder is Luke Saunders and he's with us today on this week.
1:32.2	So I was welcome to the program, Luke.
	...

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