Accessibility is one of our core values, for both our customers and producers. Locale gives local producers access to a larger customer base, bolstering brand awareness and reaching far away communities. We give customers the ability to discover new food and support businesses all across their community.
Founding story:
Chris and Jonathan have been best friends since high school and have always been passionate about finding the best food while supporting their local community. They created Locale with a simple Google Form that they sent around to friends’ parents during the pandemic as a quick way to help out their favorite local businesses who were struggling. Locale quickly turned into something much larger, a curated marketplace that allows community members to support and purchase from their favorite local businesses, even up to 100 miles away.
We started Locale in May 2020 to create the ideal, producer friendly partner because we believe that current delivery services have been built entirely around the needs of consumers and are often harmful to producers — setting unsustainable margins, charging listing fees, and unpredictable demand that doesn’t allow small businesses to plan their production. At Locale our business model is built around the needs of our local businesses and farms, putting them first. That’s why when you order on Locale, you wait a few days to get your delivery. Our business partners need this time to plan their production so that they can eliminate waste and give their staff the time that they need to make the amazing products that we offer on Locale.
Who we are:
At our core, we’re a group of young, passionate foodies who grew up loving food and always longing for ways to try new, amazing local products. We love discovering new food and sharing this with our amazing customers while empowering the producers that we work with to reach more customers in a sustainable way.
How we support our community:
How we aim to be the best possible partner to our amazing producers.
- Unlike real-time delivery services that order minutes ahead of time, we order days ahead of time so producers can plan their production and minimize waste
- We aim to uphold the strong brands that our iconic business partners have worked hard to build. As a result, we only work with businesses and farms that produce the highest quality, responsibly sourced products.
- We deliver to far away customers who live up to 100 miles away from producers. This means that we’re not cannibalizing in-store sales for our business partners. Instead, we’re helping them reach new customers and those that can’t make a long trip every week.
We value all of our stakeholders, including our drivers.
- We pay drivers well. We pay them a flat rate and per mile so that we guarantee them at least $25/hour.
- We commit to full pay transparency and believe our drivers should understand how much they’re going to make before they spend their time driving with us. Drivers sign up days ahead of time with full knowledge of how much they’re going to make.
- Most of our drivers are local college and high school students.
Last but not least, we love our customers.
- We enable you to support your favorite small business, across your entire community and discover new food while knowing that every dollar you spend on Locale is going towards fueling your local economy
Other ways we give back to the community.
- To both give back to local causes and minimize our food waste, we donate to local food banks weekly. We have donated over 10,000 pounds of food to food banks such as: Live Oak Senior Nutrition Center, Sunnyvale county winter shelter and HomeFirst services
- We donated 10% of our revenue during the wildfires last year to the California Wildfire Fund. We step up when our community needs us.
- This past holiday season we partnered with Loaves and Fishes to offer food box donations. By matching eat meal donated by our customers, we were able to donate over 1,000 meals to those in need all across the Bay Area!
So thank you for shopping Locale. Without you, we wouldn’t be able to support these amazing local businesses together. We appreciate each and every one of you for understanding that good things come to those who wait. Thank you for being patient and waiting up to a week to get these amazing local products delivered. While we’ll continue improving Locale for our amazing customers, we vow to never compromise at the sacrifice of our partners.