A Year in Review: Growing Together in 2025
- Lindsey Lusher Shute
- Jan 20
- 5 min read
As we look ahead to the coming seasons, we want to take a moment to share our cooperative’s progress in 2025— a year of meaningful growth and momentum for our community. None of this would have been possible without our member-owners, farmers, and the incredibly dedicated team at Farm Generations. We are proud of what we’ve accomplished together and deeply grateful to everyone who helped advance our mission of supporting farms and bringing local food to everyone.
Helping Farms Break Into Wholesale
As a farmer-owned and operated agricultural cooperative that strives to support our farmers first, we take the greatest pride in our farmers' success. In 2025, we added new features to the GrownBy app based on feedback from farmers. These included small user experience changes to much larger ones, such as the introduction of an entirely new marketplace in GrownBy Wholesale.
Developed in partnership with the Culinary Institute of America, this new wholesale-only marketplace makes it easy for small farmers to market their inventory to wholesale buyers, with newly incorporated terms and order editing capabilities. Wholesale presents a major sales opportunity for small farms, but few take advantage of it or know how to start. With GrownBy Wholesale, farmers can easily share their bulk availability and invite new buyers to the wholesale-only shop.
To help our farm community get started with Wholesale, we hosted several workshops with member-owner farmers from Park Ridge Organics and Gorgeous Goat Creamery. Gorgeous Goat Creamery shared their experiences with GrownBy Wholesale:
"We have been able to triple our wholesale sales in the last year because of GrownBy. We would not have been able to do that if I was still recieving orders by email and by text. [...] It made it an easy 'yes' to bring on new wholesale customers."
Expanding up North
In response to many requests, Canadian farmers can now sell CSA shares, wholesale products, and market items with GrownBy. When logging into GrownBy from Canada, the app automatically switches to CAD and highlights Canadian farms. Canadian farms can accept both bank and credit card payments through Stripe.
We are excited to get to know more Canadian farmers and welcome the opportunity to demo GrownBy. Looking ahead, we plan to incorporate additional language options to support French-speaking Canadians. Canadians are also eligible to join Farm Generations Cooperative as member-owners.
Over 30K Shoppers
We were also curious how many shoppers found our farmers on GrownBy in 2025. In total, 33K customers shopped with GrownBy Farmers in 2025-- growing 64% from last year! It is wonderful to see so many shoppers choosing local, and we are excited to see this number increase in future years.
Tripling our Orders
The number of orders and the diversity of farm products also grew in 2025: GrownBy farmers fulfilled nearly 64k orders, selling 835 different CSA shares and over 7,947 other farm products in 2025. GrownBy expanded the number of farms selling fully customizable shares in 2025 and grew the marketplace of farms selling overall through outreach events and communications.
Double the Pickups
GrownBy farmers facilitated over 170K local farm product pickups in 2025 and over 10K deliveries. With updates to the delivery fee structure, rescheduling flexibility, and Fullfilment upgrades, we've simplified delivery & order management to streamline the farm-to-table experience for our farmers and shoppers. Making farming easier is all in the details, and we will continue to improve the full cycle of farm sales on GrownBy.
Integrating Meta, Google Ads, and more
In our efforts to constantly evolve and meet our farmers' needs, GrownBy launched several updates in 2025, 3.9.5 as the newest iteration. With the introduction of Meta and Google Ads on GrownBy, farmers can see exactly how their own marketing efforts are bringing in new customers to their farm shop. These changes also help our cooperative improve our own platform-wide marketing efforts. In 2025, we were awarded a USDA grant to support platform and farmer-driven advertising on GrownBy.
We hosted a webinar on Tuesday, Jan 6, to review the many new updates launched with GrownBy 3.9. View the recording on our YouTube channel now to learn more about how 3.9 is the perfect way to get your farm sales and business on track for 2026!
Farm Generations Wins as a Cooperative
As a company, Farm Generations was recognized for our work in 2025. We were honored with the Co-op Innovation Award from Capital Impact Partners, receiving First place in the Regenerative Food System Investment Forum National Pitch Competition, and with a new grant from Co-op Hudson Valley & CoBank. We received recognition for the GrownBy platform, our food safety initiatives, and our cooperative structure and growth.
New CTO Takes the Reins
In 2025, after 5 years as our Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Ravikumar Ramanathan, moved into a new advisory role. And we're thrilled to share that our longtime senior engineer, Kheva Mann, will be stepping up as our new CTO! We are grateful for the contributions both have made to the organization and its growth, and are excited for what this shift will bring in the new year.
Thank you for being part of our work!
Every success at Farm Generations Cooperative is backed by wonderful people -- dedicated farmers, talented and patient support staff, innovative engineers, customer ideas and purchases, as well as investor and grantor backing. While we all fill different roles, we're ultimately all on the same team -- determined to bring local food and sustainable farming to the forefront. We appreciate everyone's contributions to Farm Generations and are excited to share with you our upcoming work and developments in 2026.
Memorable meals & strong communities begin with GrownBy.
GrownBy is an online marketplace and app that makes it possible for everyone to eat local. We put the farmers market in your pocket and connect shoppers with local farmers so you can eat seasonally, shop locally, and live more sustainably. Find a local farm near you.
Grow with us at @farmgenerationscoop and @grownbyapp.
GrownBy is the seamless all-in-one solution for local farm sales.
GrownBy is the only farmer-owned marketplace to platform farm products and give consumers the opportunity to find and buy food fresh from the farm.
Build your farm shop on the GrownBy Marketplace for free and start selling your products in less than an hour. Everyone on our support team has farming experience and they're eager to help you get started!
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