Over the last week I’ve been interviewing people who are using Good Eggs –  a one-stop online shop to connect local foodmakers with customers –  for an upcoming backstory. The Good Eggs website says their mission is to grow and sustain local food systems worldwide. Cool, but who are these people? I stopped by their office to find out, and to eat.

I meet Rob Spiro and Alon Salant, the co-founders of Good Eggs. Alon is the tech genius, Rob is the visionary, though they each mingle easily in both worlds. Rob, 27, took over an upstate New York farm after college. Seeing the farm’s newfound wealth pervade the community’s lifestyle in a good way inspired him to dive into growing local food systems.

Rob tells me, “Your posture towards the world is very different if you’re the consumer of a product some corporation is producing as opposed to being a participant in the way it’s produced. That’s incredibly powerful to me.”

Alon, 39, has worked in the tech sphere since the dotcom days. The two of them spent the last year researching the increase of local food producers who want to sell direct to their customers. They’ve formed technology to support this lot of die-hard locavores.

“Food is real. You can’t digitize it. A lot of what people are working on in technology is to take over an experience.  But what we want to be doing is enabling a real world experience,” he says.

With all the business talk out of the way, Rob shows me around the workspace. There are standing desks and white boards, a conference room, tubs of post-it notes, but Good Eggs headquarters doesn’t feel like an office. There’s a bike rack, baskets of fresh fruit, couches with cute people on laptops. It’s not all quiet and stuffy. Instead, it’s like the most functional roommate situation I could dream of in a big bright loft in the Mission that smells like garlic.

Libbey Goldberg, a personal chef who makes lunch at Good Eggs HQ twice a week, calls us all to eat lunch. We devour baked farm eggs with peperonata and basil oil.

There are no foodmakers here yet, but they’ll be stopping in later for dinner and a brainstorming session. Good Eggs isn't just a hub for independent foodmakers online but in real life, too.

I leave feeling good about humanity and kinda fat (double win!). The people at Good Eggs are… good eggs. Stay tuned for my backstory on several of the makers they work with on July 26, the date of the Good Eggs launch.

All photos by Summer Sewell