2022 Packer 25 — Nick Carter

(Photo courtesy Nick Carter, Graphic by Brooke Park)

The 2022 Packer 25 is our annual tribute to 25 leaders, innovators and agents of change across the fresh produce supply chain. Each year, The Packer invites the produce industry to nominate distinguished veterans, leaders and rising stars of the fresh produce industry. As always, our editorial team was energized and awed by the talented pool of nominees this year. Now in its 18th year, The Packer is once again spotlighting 25 dynamic and inspiring people who are moving the produce industry forward. 

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Nick Carter, CEO and co-founder of Market Wagon, Indianapolis, Ind.

Market Wagon was recently ranked No. 450 on the 2022 Inc. 5000 annual list of the fastest-growing companies in America. In the food and beverage category, your online farmers market was listed as the 15th fastest-growing company. Congratulations. What does this nod mean to you and what does it say about how consumers want to eat and where they want to shop?

Carter: It's a big recognition of what I've always believed to be a really important business to American farmers and shoppers. For a long time, most of the grocery industry has looked to this [sector] as a small niche that wasn't worth investing in, and I think we are proving that there are a lot of consumers who want to shop this way.

What role do you hope Market Wagon will play in getting consumers to eat more fresh produce?

I grew up on a very diverse farm, which over the course of my lifetime, bought into the consolidated industrial food system. So, we eventually just morphed into nothing but corn and soy, like a lot of western farms. Over the last 10 years, we've been reversing that trend — slowly introducing more pasture acreage, grass-fed beef, pastured pork and producing less and less corn and soy and back toward pasture-based meats. 

And then my wife and I recently bought a farm where we raise produce on a small scale. The farmer who's farming 3,000 acres of grain or more is not suddenly going to farm 3,000 acres of cucumbers. But everyone in agriculture today is talking about diversification, and in particular, production agriculture. So, next year the farmer who's farming 3,000 acres of grain may be able to farm 2,095 acres of grain and five acres of specialty produce crops because of Market Wagon. 

That's only possible when you have a place to sell it, and that's the No. 1 thing we've been trying to solve for — to create a viable marketplace where independent producers can sell produce at that embryonic stage. Where they can start with five acres and actually have a market for it. This allows for innovation.

Market Wagon started in Indiana and is now in 19 states. Where is it headed next? 

We believe every community in the U.S. should be able to order food like this, and we're going to make that happen. We aim to be in 44 of the Lower 48 by the end of 2027.

How does Market Wagon get produce from small farms with small production to the end consumer?

We batch the demand. Demand concentration is the biggest issue when you're dealing with local food, which is somewhat of a smaller niche. So, we work on a weekly batch in order to concentrate the demand to scale in a way that makes sense for anybody to operate on the fulfillment side. And then we provide a fulfillment center, where the producers manage the transportation of the inbound products. Inbound logistics is provided by the producers and then their inventory is held at fulfillment centers. In order to get items from the producer to the customer within a matter of hours, we do everything in between — it’s heavily technology driven.

Have you had a mentor who has influenced the trajectory of your career?

Rob Eldridge is a former vice president at Amazon, one of our early investors and a mentor. He always said, ‘if you're not doing logistics, you're not doing e-commerce.’ 

There have been a lot of other startups that have tried to solve the local food issue with marketplace e-commerce software. But what none of them have done is the logistics fulfillment centers that Market Wagon has implemented. It's the hard part. You can't dropship a head of lettuce, right? So, we've made sure to actually do the logistics. And it's all ours. We create our own fulfillment centers and they operate on our technology.

Read all the other 2022 Packer 25 profiles here.

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