BerriBasket wins Rep. Ro Khanna’s 2022 Congressional App Challenge in California’s 17th District

When asked what inspired the creation of BerriBasket, the students said, ”One of the more unrepresented groups as far as access and knowledge about technology is farmers. While there are outliers of farmer’s with access to advanced equipment, the majority are not technologically advanced. Having this in the back of our minds, members of our group who enjoy going to farmer’s markets on the weekends realized that the only access to getting fresh produce was to go in person, with no service that allows for the ordering and delivery of these same products. With the popularity of the grocery delivery service Instacart, it made sense for our group to create an application that would provide the same category of service as grocery delivery, but with a twist catered towards farmer’s markets and local produce. Upon researching potential competitors, we came to the conclusion that while there are services that deliver products from local farms in certain geographical areas, there was no product that could serve as a platform for any farmer’s market to gain an online presence. The only deciding factor left was to ensure there was a target audience for our application, and according to the USDA government website, as of 2021, there were 8,000 farmer’s markets spread across the U.S. By developing BerriBasket as a self service platform, vendors can onboard themselves without requiring manual intervention (high touch) by our team.”