Good Eggs, a farm-to-table food startup, is dramatically downsizing, a reminder that this time of plenty in Silicon Valley is not without its shortcomings.
And Good Eggs has admitted to those shortcomings, which helped contribute to the shut-down of much of its operations. it will close operations in Los Angeles, Brooklyn and New Orleans, leaving only its San Francisco headquarters, where it will reduce staff.
What we didn t fully understand when we started was that we were creating a new category that required a different approach to supply chains, logistics, and commerce — all of the pieces of getting food from local producers to the kitchens of our customers, the company said. It was, and is, complicated, way more complicated than we ever anticipated. We have learned so many lessons, many of them learned the hard way by making mistakes and seeing the consequences.
About 140 employees will be laid off.
The single biggest mistake we made was growing too quickly, to multiple cities, before fully figuring out the challenges of building an entirely new food supply chain, the company said. So it s scaling back to San Francisco, to see if it can survive in its original market.
The company also laid off 15 percent of its workforce in January.
Good Eggs allows customers to go online and buy produce, meats, dairy products, flowers and other products from local farms, as well as prepared foods and specialty snacks and drinks such as kombucha. The startup handles packaging and delivery to customers.
The company was founded in 2011 and had raised a respectable amount of cash — nearly $53 million — from investors, with a Series C as recently as November.
Image: Good Eggs logo from company website
