Cole Jones, founder and CEO of Local Line, says his company is helping family farmers sell products directly to customers while shortening food supply chains.
Founded in 2015, Local Line initially started as a student project at Laurier University. Jones said the company’s current business model took shape in 2018, focusing on a software-based marketplace connecting farmers with buyers such as restaurants, grocers, distributors, and institutions.
“We build technology to help shorten our food supply chains,” Jones said. “We work with family farmers who want to sell their products directly to the customer. Most of the time, that is a restaurant, a grocer, or a distributor.”
The platform includes tools for farmers to manage inventory, payments, invoicing, and deliveries, while buyers can track locally grown products and volumes.
Jones said the idea for Local Line came from conversations with farmers at the St. Jacobs Farmers’ Market north of Waterloo, who told him that traditional markets were rarely profitable.
“I became very interested in trying to build a better channel for farmers to sell to customers profitably,” he said.
“They didn’t have very many long-term sustainable options.
“By the time we got to 2017, 2018, it became obvious that the best way for us to build a business and have impact was to start with software . . . Make it a marketplace where all parties can come on and transact.”
In its earliest version, Jones was selling mostly Mennonite local food products to chefs in downtown Kitchener. He did that as a student and learned about supply chain and how chefs buy and farmers sell.
Local Line has since expanded internationally, with more than 10,000 active farmers and paying customers in 14 countries. The company’s largest market is the United States, where it works with buyers in all 50 states, including companies like Chipotle, Sweetgreen, Whole Foods, and Tops. Canada is its second-largest market, and it also has users in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.
Looking ahead, Jones said Local Line aims to achieve a gross merchandise volume of $100 billion on an annual basis and to support one million small family farms worldwide.
On a day-to-day basis, he is surprised by the company’s immense growth. But “I always feel like we should be further ahead and have done more,” he said. “But when you take a moment to reflect and think about some of the impact that we’ve had and some of the farmers we’ve had the chance to help, then yes, of course, you feel like, wow, this actually turned into something maybe that I didn’t expect it to back then.”
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