How Green is your Valley startup?

From the NYT:

The local food movement has been all about buying seasonal food from nearby farmers. Now, thanks to the Web, it is expanding to include far-away farmers too.

A new start-up, Foodzie, is an online farmers market where small, artisan food producers and growers can sell their products. Foodies in Florida, say, can order raw, handcrafted pepperjack cheese from Traver, Calif., or organic, fair-trade coffee truffles from Boulder, Colo.

I was interested in two things - firstly, the Biz model:

Foodzie is a gourmet version of Etsy, the online marketplace for handmade goods that has been hugely successful, selling $12.9 million worth of products in December. Like Etsy, sellers set up virtual storefronts on the site to post their wares and tell shoppers about themselves. On Foodzie, sellers can post their goods for free and Foodzie takes a 20 percent cut of each sale.

While a 20 percent cut is high for an e-commerce site (Etsy sellers pay 20 cents to list each item and the site takes a 3.5 percent cut), it is low in the food business, Mr. LaFave said. Food retailers typically take 50 percent of the sale price and distributors take another 10 percent.

Unlike Etsy, where buyers and sellers do the entire interaction independently, Foodzie serves as a middleman. It takes the purchase information from the buyer, processes the payment and e-mails the seller a prepaid shipping label.

Doing well by doing good (until a me-too with a lower scrape starts up, anyway) - so whats not to like?

“There is a misconception that all these foods are more expensive than mass-produced alternatives,” he said. “People are pouring their heart and soul into these products, using the highest quality, heirloom ingredients. Buyers are really supporting the local economy and small, independent food makers and growers.”

The second thing that intrigued me was how the "home grown organic food" brigade is running against the grain of the "low carbon footprint food" brigade in this case. Still, VC's have pumped in $1m so that probably tells us where the (handcrafted) bread is (organically) buttered