My wife took a bite of a Persian cucumber and said, “Oh, this is really good.” That was the Farm to People one. Then I tried it. An explosion of flavor, sweet and juicy. Way better than the plastic clamshell of Persian cukes we’d picked up at the supermarket the day before, and those are a staple in our house. We ran a side-by-side, and it wasn’t even close.
Full disclosure: I’m a customer. That cucumber was at my doorstep in the Farm to People box, which is why I can tell you the difference is real and not a press release.
“Mostly cucumber, I feel like, doesn’t have much flavor,” Anina von Haeften told me a day later, over Zoom. “But when you get really good grown cucumbers, it’s amazing: that cucumber essence, where they’re actually flavorful.”
Those particular cucumbers came from Halal Pastures. That’s the whole pitch, right there in one vegetable. Know which farm grew it. Taste the difference. It’s the same mantra we use in the Hudson Valley when we talk about cannabis (know your farmer, know your food), and that overlap is exactly why Farm to People belongs in these pages.
It also helps that you can now get it. Farm to People delivers across NYC, Westchester and into Fairfield County, which means the box that started this taste test isn’t a Brooklyn-only luxury anymore. It’s in our footprint.
A Better Tomato in Brooklyn
Anina is Creative Director and Chief Brand Officer. Michael Robinov is CEO. They started Farm to People in 2013, alongside Michael’s father, David, the third co-founder, and the one with the longest food history of the bunch. Both Anina and Michael were named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in 2021. Today, the company sources from more than 150 farms within 300 miles of New York City and offers over 1,300 products a week, more than 70 percent of them grown within that same 300-mile radius of its Brooklyn headquarters.
I asked Michael whether 2013 felt like joining a movement or just trying to get a better tomato into Brooklyn. The cannabis parallel grabbed him first.
“The little bit I know about that world is supply and demand,” he said. “Food is regulated as well, but obviously to a lesser degree, and to a lesser degree across state lines. I can buy a tomato from New York State. I can also buy a tomato from Mexico.”
That gap is the whole game. A tomato grown out of state carries a very different cost structure, and that’s a problem for the upstate farmers Farm to People wants to support. Farmers in Mexico, farmers in lower-wage states, farmers under looser labeling rules: they can all bring the number down. New York can’t. The state minimum wage is up to $17 an hour, more than double the federal floor, which Michael calls “sort of embarrassing.”
So when you’re standing in a supermarket looking at a $1.99 tomato, you’re not thinking about any of that. Michael wants you to. “Know your food and know your farmer really means transparency to us,” he said. “It means understanding these things that, when you go to the supermarket, you don’t think about.”
A 40-Year Head Start
The family piece runs deeper than a dad lending a hand. Michael grew up the child of an entrepreneur, watching someone spot a problem and build the answer, again and again, in food. “A lot of it is thanks to my dad, David,” he told me. “It was inspiring.”
What he’s being modest about is the scale of David’s head start. Nearly 40 years ago, David Robinov opened two of the first natural-food markets in Westchester: Nature‘s Warehouse in Larchmont and the Katonah Natural Market. He later partnered with Mrs. Green’s and expanded into additional stores through the mid-1990s. He was a pioneer in natural and organic food before most shoppers had a word for it. So when Farm to People talks about transparency and sustainably grown food delivered to your door, it isn’t a first-generation idea. It’s the online next chapter of a 40-year project, and, with the expansion north, a literal return home to the county where David started.
Michael’s own path ran through five months across India, Thailand, and China with Anina, the Hawthorne Valley Farm trips as a Waldorf kid, and a teenage job working the Hawthorne Valley stand at the Union Square Market every Saturday for spending money. That market, to him, was home to some of the best food in New York and an incredible community, but it only worked for shoppers who could make it there at 9 a.m., rain or shine. Everyone else had a doctor’s appointment, a kid’s birthday party, life. The market slid to secondary, then tertiary, on the to-do list.
“What if there was a model to connect the amazing food at these markets with high-expectation, convenience-minded New Yorkers?” Michael said. He, Anina, and David bootstrapped it for years: under-resourced, customer-centric, pivoting the technology again and again, all while doing the hard thing of staying in business and paying rent in New York City.
When the Tomato Goes Parabolic
Tomatoes, it turns out, are a great thing to pick on right now. The conventional commodity market has gone “parabolic,” in Michael’s words. A case ran about $22 a couple of weeks before we spoke. At one point it spiked past $75.
“That very much to me is a supply-and-demand issue,” he said. “Especially when you lack seasonality. When the world becomes ‘I eat asparagus or tomatoes 52 weeks out of the year,’ you don’t think about where that food is coming from, or what it means as markets shift due to seasons.”
The fix Farm to People keeps pushing is seasonal eating: not as a virtue, but because the food is simply better. We’re in tomato season now. “Tomatoes taste absolutely amazing in July and August and September,” Michael said, “and not really very good in January and February and March.” The job, as he sees it, is to make a deeply opaque market a little less so.
Anina filled in what shoppers miss beyond the calendar: scale and crop diversity. Farm to People backs smaller farms, and smaller farms grow a wider variety of crops, which matters for crop rotation and soil health. Big operations tend to grow one or two crops, partly because high-tech harvesting equipment is brutally expensive and easier to justify when it’s built for a single crop.
“They’re harvesting things by hand, and their labor is more expensive, and all of that. It’s the harsh reality,” she said. “A lot of people are like, ‘Oh, this feels like a ripoff; they’re just charging more because it’s local.’ And there’s actually really real cost to that.”
The 50-Cent Promise
Here’s the number I keep coming back to. At an event called “One Bite For Farmers”, I learned that Farm to People pays its farmers roughly 50 cents on every retail dollar. In traditional retail, the farmer sees about 13 cents. So how does the math work when you’re paying nearly four times what everyone else pays?
Michael’s answer: don’t compete on the same shelf. “We’re not trying to buy the same cherry tomatoes you see at a grocery store,” he said. The reason those foods cost what they do is the chain of middlemen each tomato passes through from the farmer to the table. “The people getting squeezed are really the customer, who’s paying way too much for not enough value, and the farmer, who’s not getting enough for the value they’re creating.”
He’s careful not to assign blame: everyone in the middle is dealing with rising costs and wars they can’t control. The idea is structural: go directly, if not exclusively directly, to the person producing the food, so the majority of what you pay goes back to the farmer. “Everything else that we’re collapsing is what we need to make our operations work,” he said. Rent, technology, the team, the delivery driver, the packaging. “It’s really just about rethinking the supply chain first and foremost.” 
Five Hundred Dollars and a Water Pump
Farm to People partnered with Dana DiPrima and her For Farmers Movement to get funding directly into farmers’ hands. I met Dana at the One Bite For Farmers dinner. The premise is almost embarrassingly simple, and that’s the point.
Farm equipment is wildly expensive. One of the new John Deere tractors can run over a million dollars. “If you’re running a 10,000-acre farm in the middle of the country, you can make the math work for a one-, two-, three-million-dollar robotic tractor,” Michael said. “But if you’re a 10-acre farm in upstate New York, you can barely rationalize a $10,000 harvester.”
Federal subsidies and grants, he noted, mostly flow to the largest farms. For Farmers runs the other way: a grassroots channel that lets eaters who want this food fund the gear small farmers desperately need. And these aren’t $500 grants in the abstract sense of “not much money.” They’re grants that change what a farm can do.
Dana described how a $500 grant bought a farmer a water pump, allowing them to finally irrigate their fields. “Exactly,” Michael said. “It could be a water pump, a chicken fence, a chicken coop, a new tractor, a dehydrator. You name it.”
Anina added a wrinkle that says a lot about where things stand: some specialized equipment for small organic farms isn’t even made here. One farm they spoke with needed a machine that shakes pests off plants, which is available only in Italy, where organic farming is further ahead. The farming reality here, she said, is very different from that in Europe.
Whose Hands the Money Lands In
Anina has described feminism as rejecting a world where pay and rights get handed out unfairly. I asked how that conviction shows up in who Farm to People sources from.
“It goes back to who we support,” she said, “farmers doing right by their community while regenerating land and soil. “That is the money we want to be putting more of in those farmers’ hands.” The payoff has been watching some of those farms grow alongside Farm to People. One farmer they’ve worked with for several years has more than doubled his business through the orders they send.
Just as important is the reliability. A lot of these farmers only sell through farmers markets and their own CSAs: great channels, but unpredictable. Set up for a market on a bad-weather day, and you don’t know what you’ll move. Because Farm to People crop-plans ahead with its growers, a farmer can plant knowing there’s already a market for the harvest. “That’s a really great peace of mind for them,” Anina said.
Under One Percent
Farm to People keeps food waste under 1 percent. In a perishable grocery business, that sounds like a fantasy. Anina walked me through why it isn’t.
First, they’re online, not a retail store. “You go into a grocery store, and the shelves always need to be stocked, looking abundant,” she said. “For us, we don’t need to do that.” No three-sad-heads-of-lettuce problem, no overstocking just to make a shelf look full.
Second, a good share of customers subscribe to weekly farm boxes. That subscription data is the key to planning. Orders to farmers get adjusted as the cutoff approaches (a little less here, a little more there) so the warehouse is mostly bringing in what’s already sold. Perishable inventory turns over fast. Whatever’s left goes to donation partners who can turn it into meals without extra processing. The rest goes to compost.
And occasionally, the leftovers become the menu. Ramps show up for a narrow window each spring; any excess is turned into a mash and folded into ramp butter sold on the site. Michael teased something with strawberries. But by and large, he said, it’s been easier to just keep the waste low than to upcycle their way out of it.
The Conscious Shopper Is the Conscious Consumer
Which brings us back to why two food founders are running in a cannabis magazine. The values-driven New Yorker who reads ingredient lists and asks where the tomato came from is, more often than not, the same person who asks which farm grew the flower before they buy it. Same instinct, different aisle.
It surfaced naturally at the end of our call. Anina used to partake; it just stopped agreeing with her, though she’s quick to say she thinks it’s great for other people. Michael keeps a little around: “a one-hit wonder,” he called it, “every once in a while, if it’s been a strong, overstimulating day.” What he reached for, unprompted, was Hudson Cannabis Co., picked up at Gotham in the city. It helps with sleep, he said, even if he’s not crazy about the slight grogginess the next morning.
It’s a small thing. But it’s the whole crossover in miniature: the same person who taste-tests a cucumber and wants to know the farm is the one reaching for craft Hudson Valley flower and wanting to know the grower.
Bursting at the Seams
Farm to People moved to seven-day delivery about a year ago. When it took over its current Bushwick warehouse, the company was doing about 2,000 deliveries a week. It’s now over 8,000. “It’s just bursting at the seams,” Michael said.
A bigger warehouse is on the horizon, designed above all for pick, pack, and fill: more loading docks for farmers, more temperature zones for produce, more conveyor lines for the team. “Better for the food, better for the farmer, better for the team, and better for the customer,” Michael said, knocking on wood, because he’s superstitious.
Geography is part of the growth too. The push into Westchester and Fairfield, Michael has said elsewhere, was an “organic evolution”: customers kept leaving the city for the suburbs, or had family who did, so the base was already up here waiting. New York stays home base, though. Both founders are New Yorkers; Anina grew up upstate. They treat the region as a lab for a better way of eating, and because the company is a public benefit corporation, the mission is baked into the structure. The Bushwick space keeps hosting events (a place to meet the farmers, meet each other, break bread) and, eventually, could become a model other cities might adopt, whether Farm to People goes there or helps locals run it themselves.
What’s in the Rotation
I close every interview the same way: what’s in your rotation right now? This was the first time I had to aim that question at a fridge instead of a stash jar.
Anina lit up. We spoke in June, the time of year, she said, when the greens are unbeatable, before the real heat makes even head lettuce struggle. She’s deep into mizuna, chrysanthemum greens, and komatsuna, the last one a cousin of bok choy but greener. And cucumbers. “This sounds boring, but cucumber season is starting, and I just love cucumbers so much,” she said. Lemon cucumbers, Japanese cucumbers, the Persian cucumbers from Halal Pastures that started this whole thing. “People are kind of like, ‘a cucumber is a cucumber.’ You can taste the difference.”
I know. My wife and I ran the test.
Consume responsibly (and legally!)
