236: Roza Ferdowsmakan on Sourcing Food in the Digital Age

236: Roza Ferdowsmakan on Sourcing Food in the Digital Age.

Helping foodies find chefs, and chefs find local farms, all through their phones.

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Roza wants to change the way people connect with food, with their communities, and with the earth. As a tech company founder, she has created a community-driven, farm-to-table mobile app called bites., set to be released in beta to the metro-Phoenix community in July. bites. is a marketplace app for foodies of all socio-economic levels to connect with and reserve personal chef services offered by homemaker cooks, culinary students, and professional personal chefs. These participating chefs are encouraged to source ingredients from local farms.

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These farms, whether they identify themselves as urban, micro, organic, co-op, family-owned, or simply small farms are encouraged to participate and gain visibility by visiting the bites. website and creating a farm profile prior to the July 1st beta release date so that their profiles will be up and running when the app goes live. Roza also just started a Phoenix area local meetup called “grassroots”, intended to engage foodies, local culinary talent, local farms, and sustainability supporters in community events centered around sustainability and education, all part of the ethos behind the bites movement. Beyond “grassroots”, she is working to co-organize and resurrect TEDx Phoenix for the local community.

In This Podcast:

We are excited to share this conversation with Roza Ferdowsmakan, someone who cares about building up the local food economy as much as we do. Roza decided she could make a difference in her community by connecting foodies, culinary talents, and local farms through a specially design app. It is with her new app that she hopes to give people culinary awakenings like the one she had as a young teenager.

Listen in and learn about:

Starting on a farm, in a greenhouse and at a farmers market at age 13
Her first taste of quiche and the culinary awakening she experienced
Having an idea to create to help fulfill culinary awakenings for others
Using her connections and knowledge as a technology attorney to create an app
How the app helps people find local chefs of various skills to create dinners using local foods
The ground-breaking BETA version opening in Phoenix in July 2017 with plans to expand nationally in October 2017
www.bites.mobi
The process she went through to design and develop the app
Her goal of keeping the app free and without ads, she did much of the design herself
What an ethos is and how she kept the app true to her vision
How chefs, cooks, and culinary students benefit from being part of the bites. community
How local farms benefit from connecting with the participants
The mission and vision behind bites. – especially how it connects to community
How she developed the fee structure to help develop the revenue plan giving the most benefit to both the foodie and the culinary participants
Her grassroots local meet-up in the Phoenix area

As well as:

Her failure – Her attempt to create an organic clothing line and running into issues due to volume challenges while keeping the quality that she wanted
Her success – Having her book of poems selected for publication
Her drive – Creating meaning in her life, intentional living
Her advice – Let your life be a series of meaningful actions in support of conscious living