In 2021, I co-founded GreenChain and worked full-time through the year. We sought to build a B2B marketplace to address significant inefficiencies in the food supply chain by digitizing the commerce and payments, and aggregating data for better discovery and supply-demand-price matching. We ultimately sunset GreenChain in December 2021 for the following reasons specific to the market and product.

1. Our main product differentiator (”the marketplace”) would not succeed because of the following issues with our conjectures for why restaurants would value the marketplace:
   1. Price comparison
      1. Conflicts with the distributor’s incentives who work on price arbitrage
   2. Stockouts
      1. If one distributor is out of stock, likely all of them are out of stock
      2. Distributors don’t want to deliver to one-off customers
2. Thus what remains is digitization, which has the following issues:
   1. Many competitors are already solving this (Choco, Rekki, Katoo, Notch, Cut+Dry, Pepper)
   2. We would not have any opportunity for innovation in product or business model; instead, we would be pursuing a sales and funding war
   3. Very difficult to monetize this product because it is already a very low-margin industry, and we wouldn’t necessarily be providing that much value
3. Market trends
   1. Much supplier consolidation in the industry, increasingly broadliners are acquiring the small and medium distributors (this was our target market segment)
4. Other
   1. We didn’t believe a marketplace would significantly reduce food waste

Long-form version:

Sunsetting GreenChain [long form]