The Spanish Crowdfarming has closed its latest , led by Q-Impact, Seaya Ventures and Triodos (through the Triodos Food Transition Europe Fund). Although the details of the operation have not yet been disclosed, financial sources confirmed that the amount around 15 million euros.
This is Crowdfarming, the platform that seeks to “democratize” the food supply chain
The history of Crowdfarming arose when the brothers Gonzalo and Gabriel Úrculo took over their family’s orange farm and they soon realized that they had to go outside the food supply chain to be successful.
After founding the company Naranjas del Carmen in 2010, they launched a website to offer their oranges to the final consumer and forget about intermediaries. Thus, the Úrculo brothers invented the “adoption of their trees” as a way for consumers to create a link with the origin of their oranges, generating a greater . This program has been so well received that currently all orange trees have an owner, that is, there are 13,000 “adopted” orange trees.
After having aroused the interest of other farmers and after joining the co-founders Juliette Simonin and Moisés Calviño, was born in 2017 Crowdfarming, an online platform where farmers get income through two ways:
- One, the most classic, in which they can sell their crops directly to final consumers.
- Another, in which consumers can sponsor a tree. This adoption implies that the client will receive a photograph of the sponsored tree, information on its evolution and a minimum of three boxes of its fruit. All the files of the farmers that can be sponsored include extensive information on the history of the plantation and its cultivation conditions, such as whether they adhere to the parameters of organic farming.
As Crowdfarming explains on its website, this sponsorship model allows the producer to obtain better prices, which “helps to generate better jobs and social conditions in rural environments.” It also allows the producer to ensure the sale at a fixed price and produce on demandavoiding the waste of food that is grown without being sold.
“We work to disintermediate the food supply chain. How to disintermediate a chain without becoming a middleman? The answer is simple: providing value-added services. The direct sale of food between farmers and consumers needs services for it to work: a platform where you can offer and sell products, logistics to move the packages, customer service (or CrowdFarmers as we call them) and dissemination tools to make themselves known. know. These are the 4 services that we provide from CrowdFarming”, they explain.
The agricultural marketplace will promote its internationalization
Nowadays more than 100 farmers from various European countries sell their harvest on Crowdfarming, which has a total of 62,000 adoptions. Apart from breaking traditional agricultural work, the startup has also given work to 30 people on the farm, while a team of 50 people are in charge of the platform.
Thanks to this new business model, consumers (whether adopting a tree, beehive or plot) establish a relationship of trust with the producerreserving a quantity of food at a certain price beforehand, becoming participants in the production chain that they can supervise with their own eyes, and at the same time encouraging rural tourism in agricultural areas.
The company will now use these funds to improve its logistics processes, help more producers obtain EU organic certification and create new teams of agronomists in , Italy, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and Spain, in order to continue its expansion.
Gonzalo Ucruloco-founder of the company assured that “Our new partners have shown total alignment with our mission and absolute respect for our values. We were already generating a positive economic result and we could have continued on our own. This situation gave us the privilege of being able to choose the right partners for the challenges to come.”
Image: Crowdfarming
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