Azoti is a new online platform and service dedicated to bringing your local food market closer than ever by creating instant food hubs where farmers and buyers can connect with each other and with healthy, fresh, delicious local foods.

It's the age of the Internet, the age of connectivity: shouldn’t you be able to easily connect with local farmers to get the freshest food available? Shouldn’t this kind of healthy food be made more readily available at your home, workplace, or even public schools?

At Azoti, we think so!

As farms have grown from small, family-owned enterprises to large, corporate businesses, the quality of your food has really suffered.

Since the farms are larger, they are more spread out. This means that it takes longer for your food to get from the farm to your home.

Not only is food less fresh when from these corporate farms -- it's less good for you, too. Because they are a business, factory farms tend to use both antibiotics and hormones on their animals and crops to maximize their profit. 

Recently, there has been a movement back to supporting local, family farms. However, with its outdated mode, at the moment, getting local foods is both difficult and expensive. The local food market is in need of an upgrade in order to get good food back on the market.

In Italian, Azoti means “nitrogen,” an element that encourages plant growth, and that’s kind of what we want to do to the local food business. We want to encourage the growth and spread of fresh, healthy, local food.

Our internet platform makes it easier than ever for farmers to reach a wider audience, whether it be for a family’s dinner table or a school’s cafeteria. Nutrition is important for everyone, and Azoti makes it easier than ever for people like you to get fresh, local food delivered straight to you.

We do two things to help connect farmers to the wider community:

Food hubs are necessary for local food to go mainstream and break out of its current niche.  A food hub is just like your typical fulfillment or distribution center except that it caters to small farmers and food producers.  Food hubs are vital links between food producers and consumers in that they provide aggregation, marketing/sales, delivery, cleaning, storage and safety features that most small farmers cannot afford or handle.  A food hub could be created in your garage, at the local produce distributor or even as part of a large F500 distribution network seeking to decentralize operations.  No matter what the size, Azoti helps you create food hubs within 2 weeks so that both individual and bulk buyers can purchase from small farmers in your locale.

Once you've taken the leap of forming a food hub in your locale, Azoti will provide an online platform that instantly connects farmers with individual and bulk buyers in your area using subscriptions or sample packs, e.g. packages of food.  With our proprietary "just in time" ordering system, we allow buyers to have transparency into small farmers inventory, customized ordering, higher order accuracy and the guarantee that your selections are freshly picked while minimizing waste all along the way.  Tie-in the donation module that connects your local food bank to any "extras" leftover from either the farmer or buyer, and you truly have a system that connects everyone in the community to locally grown food.

Food hubs + internet solutions will change how food is produced and eaten, making it easier than ever to make the switch to healthy, local food!

No other companies that connect farmers with consumers are taking it quite to the step that we have. Azoti provides marketing, packaging, and consulting all from our online platform! We’re able to form connections like never before, and this helps us to help quite a few people.

We want to make it easier than ever for regular people like you to reap the benefits of fresh food. Good food should be easy to get, and we want to help make that possible. Whether you're buying for your family or for a local food bank, we want to help you get the freshest food available.

If you're familiar with the school fundraiser called Market Day, which is owned by Gordon Food Services and sells cookie dough and frozen meals, then you may be interested in bringing he Azoti Local Food Fundraiser to your school or church as nothing will change the future more than locally grown food given to kids and their parents.  Whether a parent-teacher fundraiser or a class picnic, any churches or schools who order from Azoti will get a percentage of the proceeds donated back.

Farmers will really benefit from a wider and more diverse audience. We help farmers to reach out to more people than ever to really expand their market and help them to thrive. With your help, we can give the little guy the push he needs to thrive in a market so overrun with factory farms.

Our online platform allows us to connect you with farmers and provide food year-round. You can either get a monthly subscription or a one-time buy, but you can rest easy knowing that every penny spent was put back into your community.

Azoti has already had some incredible success in our desire to better-connect the local food industry.

We won the 2014 Social Entrepreneur Award and have partnered with both Premier ProduceOne and ProACT USA. With their existing customer base and 71 distribution centers, they will help us to provide service across the US and Canada.

We want to move forward with this success and help to apply our platform to food manufacturers or restaurants that may want to purchase with local food. We also plan to expand to serve Cleveland, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Denver, and Dallas before expanding internationally.

The future is bright for Azoti, and we’ve love for you to join us in our journey to revolutionize the local food industry. For more information about the future of Azoti and how you could be a part of it, please request access to the Business Plan page of this profile!

Dave has been an internet entrepreneur, “Big 4” management consultant, and an economist for the past 18 years. He’s launched internet market platforms for F100 clients as well as early stage companies across multiple industries including automotive, financial services, healthcare, higher education, health and beauty, insurance and now agriculture. The idea for Azoti came about because of Dave’s Italian grandparents, who both complained to Dave about the quality of meat and produce while he worked weekends in their victory gardens.

Andrew has worked on a permaculture biodynamic farm after completing his engineering degree from University of Virginia.  Now a Venture for America Fellow, Andrew joined the team to lead Azoti's food hub in Columbus with the goal of building an onboarding process for new markets across North America.

Partha is a technologist, entrepreneur with 24+ years of experience in building software products and product companies.  Back in 2003, Partha was one of the first technical product directors in the U.S. to lead an offshore development team to a successful implementation for a F500 company.  His passion for food and love of disruption have led him to Azoti.