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.

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.

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.

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.

Go to https://www.urbanfarm.org/2017/05/18/roza-ferdowsmakan/ for more information on this podcast and to find our other great guests.