Building a 2-sided Farm to Table Marketplace from Indiana: Nick Carter, CEO of Market Wagon (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What happens when COVID strikes?

Nick Carter: Everything in our company is measured on week-over-week sales. I can remember my co-founder texting me one Sunday afternoon saying, “We had a nice week today.” The sales volume grew 600% in one week. It’s because everybody had to stay home. They needed delivery. The traditional supply chain could not keep up with the demand.

However, local small food producers were able to pivot. Small food producers scale up and they each grow by being able to supply restaurants. They look for chefs who will patronize them. In a single week in Indiana, all of that shut down. Every restaurant was closed. You have all these farms. We’ve heard stories of farmers dumping milk, but all of those are on an industrial scale. Our farmers are just saying, “These eggs that are coming out of the backside of the hen today don’t need to go into foodservice packaging. They can go in retail packaging.”

We scaled right up with it. It was an amazing testimony to the supply chain that we had built. We were able to surge higher than most groceries did through that period, because we were able to scale up the supply chain. We were also able to onboard more producers as well. We were able to onboard more and more producers as well. We had a lot of producers who built their businesses entirely in food service or wholesale. They were not interested in the online farmer’s market until March 2002.

Sramana Mitra: At this point, you were still in Indiana and Ohio only, right?

Nick Carter: Yes, we were in six cities in March of 2020.

Sramana Mitra: What happens after?

Nick Carter: By the end of 2020, we were in 30 cities.

Sramana Mitra: What states did you open up in?

Nick Carter: We went to Michigan, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Tennessee, Alabama, Atlanta, West Virginia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Maryland.

Sramana Mitra: You must have raised financing at this point?

Nick Carter: It’s a big testimony to the venture capitalist in Chicago who believed in us. We had built a long relationship with them already. We already knew that we were going to be a venture-backed company and we were going to be scaling quickly. We had about a year of relationship with Hyde Park Venture Partners. Guy Turner knew our business and said, “We’re interested, but you got to be at a larger scale for it to make sense for us.”

When all this happened, one of the things that venture capitalists like to see is projections, a model, and proven numbers. The word unprecedented was just overused at that time, but it really was.

Sramana Mitra: If you showed any VC that you were going to grow 600%, they were not going to believe it.

Nick Carter: Customer acquisition cost was zero at that time. We were acquiring customers by accident because people couldn’t get groceries anywhere else.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Building a 2-sided Farm to Table Marketplace from Indiana: Nick Carter, CEO of Market Wagon
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