LemonGRAFT is a sustainable, decentralized food network app, connecting growers directly with local customers. Clean Coders partnered with founder Zach Correa to build a product which replaces the industrial food supply chain with a direct-to-consumer, environmentally-conscious community for produce, meat, and other fresh foods. LemonGRAFT is akin to a digital farmer's market, where consumers can place orders with many local growers, yet pick them up from a single, central location. While this approach is convenient for buyers, such a radical concept could not be accomplished with a generic e-commerce platform, and required the minds at Clean Coders Studio to craft a custom application.

[quote-block {:text "Clean Coders brought a lot more to the table than just code—they understand startups, and if they just did whatever I had asked, my project would not have worked out." :portrait "/images/case-studies/lemongraft/zach-correa.jpg" :portrait-alt "Zach Correa, Founder and CEO of LemonGRAFT" :attribution "Zach Correa" :role "Founder & CEO, LemonGRAFT"}]

Challenges

All simple user experiences are deceptive: they hide tons of complexity under a polished exterior, refined over many iterations. The LemonGRAFT sales pitch promised a straightforward shopping experience, which required many complex features to fit together seamlessly. While the concept of a digital farmer's market is simple to convey, thinking through its implementation yields some sticky questions: how do buyers receive their purchases? How do growers ensure their listings are accurate, and fresh? How do hosts sort dropoffs from multiple growers, and assign them to the correct buyers?

Even beyond the prospect of constructing such an experience, there remained the important challenge of explaining this new shopping method through marketing materials. Considering LemonGRAFT was a startup with no users, it was important to form a positive first impression.

Our Strategy

Facilitating a decentralized, sustainable food system required a great deal of discovery and planning. At Zach's direction, we learned about the existing food industry, defined robust user personas, and mapped out as many use cases as we could think of.

By visualizing a digital farmers market, it was easy to identify the first two types of users: growers and buyers. Growers would list their food on LemonGRAFT's website, and buyers could browse products listed by all growers in their area.

On most marketplace websites—Etsy, eBay, or Amazon, for example-sellers ship goods to buyers anywhere in the country, and sometimes even internationally. Shipping fresh food violated LemonGRAFT's values of local, sustainable food, so Zach knew right away that mimicking this approach would not work for his business.

Instead, Zach introduced a third type of user to LemonGRAFT: hosts. The role of a host was to operate a central meeting location for growers to drop off their products, and for buyers to pick up their orders. Thanks to hosts, growers could drop off many orders at once, and buyers could pick up all products from one order in a single trip. This innovation drastically reduced the travel time required of both growers and buyers, and unlocked further sustainability in LemonGRAFT's business model.

The addition of hosts as a third type of user significantly impacted the user experience of both growers and buyers, so Clean Coders meticulously mapped each user's features, and how they all fit together, intersected, and overlapped.

Buyers

Introducing an unconventional shopping paradigm had the potential to confuse new users, so Clean Coders ensured that the experience for buyers followed a traditional e-commerce workflow as closely as possible. However, several exceptions were required: first, it didn't make sense to allow buyers to browse LemonGRAFT's entire, nationwide inventory, so we designed a user interface which restricted listings shown based on the buyer's chosen pickup location instead.

Second, buyers needed to consider an additional factor while browsing products: when and where to pick up their order. We repeated this information at every step: on the product page, in the cart, at checkout, and on a calendar accessible through their dashboard.

Growers

Buyers alone could not sustain LemonGRAFT's e-commerce model, so the next set of features Clean Coders built was for growers. As with other marketplace websites, the primary role growers filled in the LemonGRAFT ecosystem was to populate the website with products for buyers to purchase.

Following the same rationale we applied to buyers, Clean Coders kept this experience as familiar as possible: growers could list products on their storefront, then manage and fulfill orders.

However, as with buyers, LemonGRAFT's unique premise required some deviation from a typical marketplace user experience: first, to encourage growers to advertise fresh and accurate inventory, Clean Coders designed features which caused listings to expire after a certain time period, requiring growers to keep their products and quantities up to date.

Second, also similar to buyers, growers needed a calendar to coordinate dropoff times and locations for their customers' orders through a clear, itemized schedule.

Hosts

A host's responsibility was to oversee a central dropoff hub for a region of growers, and a central pickup location for nearby buyers. This role was both crucial and unique to LemonGRAFT, and required the most thought, effort, and creativity to execute.

In order to connect the other two types of users, hosts required visibility into all information provided to growers and buyers which intersected at their location. This meant that a host's feature set was in many ways more comprehensive and nuanced than the others. For example, instead of simply viewing a calendar of dropoff and pickup times, hosts needed the ability to set dropoff and pickup windows.

Clean Coders also designed a tool to simplify the task of sorting each product dropped off into the correct buyer's bag. Without the assistance of software, this task would require undue accounting to reconcile products and customers, considering growers could arrive with orders for multiple buyers, and buyers could place orders from multiple growers.

Impact

LemonGRAFT launched successfully, offering local food to communities in Florida and Tennessee. Thanks to custom software, Clean Coders brought a unique product to life, which could not have been created with generic, off-the-shelf software. Through our meticulously-designed application, Zach's vision became a delicious reality for many satisfied buyers, growers, and hosts.