Frubana is a Colombian B2B platform of agri-products for restaurants and small retailers in Latin America. The aim is to increase transparency and facilitate logistics between food supply producers and buyers, ultimately making it easier for farmers to sell their produce, and reducing the price of food for Latin Americans.
Founded in 2018 by Rappi veteran Fabián Gomez, Frubana has over 100 employees and recently raised US$12m in funding from monashees, Kairos, GE32 Capital, and YC.
WHY FOOD? Fabián Gomez came from a farming background in Bogota. “I understood the fun part of planting and harvesting, and the harder part of distribution and commercialization of fruits.”
Gomez met Rappi Co-Founder & CEO Simon Borrero when Rappi was just getting started, with about ten employees. “It was really fun, we learned to go from zero to one.” Gomez was in charge of expanding Rappi into new cities, and was also on the fundraising team.
Then he saw the limes 🍋: “I saw a disconnect on gross margins, between for example sourcing limes, and the price Rappi would get on them.” He stayed on with Rappi through the closing of the US$1b SoftBank round, and welcomed the Rappi co-founders as the first angel investors in Frubana.
THE PRODUCT: Frubana currently operates in four cities in Colombia, operating a sourcing and picking center to procure fresh products directly from farmers and distributors in plazas and delivering produce directly to restaurants with more consistent quality, reliability and prices. “It’s an intersection of high tech and the real world,” Gomez says, “because tech alone doesn’t take fruits from farm to restaurant. We thought it would just be an app in the beginning.”
DISRUPTION: Gomez says Frubana is helping shift the food supply industry from a push system to a pull system with data. “Push: farmers sell whatever they have to a truck driver, who goes to a plaza and sells to a tier 3 distributor, who sells up to tiers 2 and 1,” Gomez explains. “That takes about 72 hours.”
Timing is especially critical when you are dealing with perishable products. “But we have the data to know what we are going to sell next week.” As for the limes? “We’ve found that there is someone who wants every quality." Now Frubana sell them in two SKUs, the pretty ones and the less pretty but just as good ones.