How Matt Tortora Made a Local Food Delivery Business

At Jamestown Fish in Rhode Island, where Matt Tortora was a chef, customers demanded fresh, premium ingredients. The restaurant typically bought them from distributors. “I could pick up the phone, give them a call, and in some cases, same day, get what I needed,” Tortora says. 

But the distributors the restaurant worked with were sourcing food from all over the country. The ingredients were rarely local and often not as fresh as they could be. 

Tortora and co-founders Erin Tortora and William Araújo set out to solve this problem. Their business, WhatsGood, launched in 2015 and matches restaurants with local farmers. It also recently started offering regular consumers a delivery service of farmers market goods and now has 20k consumers signed up, with a monthly growth rate of about 30%. The company recently closed its seed round of funding at $6.9m, with $5.8m coming recently and $1.1m at launch.