Want To Know Where Your Food Comes From? RealTimeFarms.com
There's Michelin and there's Zagat. Neither of them tell you where your food is coming from. Real Time Farms does.
Online, May 9, 2011 (Newswire.com) - MAY 9, 2011. There's Michelin, there's Zagat, but neither tell you where to find food you trust. RealTimeFarms.com fills this gap.
After a spectacular launch in Ann Arbor, MI - restaurants in the New York area join Real Time Farms: Bark Hot Dogs, Bees Knees Cafe, Bobo, Compose, Fable, Glasbern Inn, New World Bistro Bar, New World Home Cooking, Northern Spy Food Co., and PRINT.
The New York launch marks the opening of this self sign up service to all restaurants nationwide. Any restaurant anywhere can sign themselves up to become a trailblazer of transparency.
Committed to transparency, these restaurants are answering questions before the guest walks in the door, questions usually reserved for the server: "Is this free range?" "Where do the mushrooms come from?" "How was this grown?" By using Real Time Farms to farm-link every ingredient on their menu, restaurants illustrate their commitment to food transparency.
The poached egg frisee salad, or an all beef hotdog with sauerkraut and mustard, become richer as customers experience the food's story. Each farm sourcing the menu has its own page with pictures and narrative. Click on the word egg in the menu and see the chickens in the pasture. Likewise, you can see the frisee growing on the rooftop or the artisan making the 'kraut - all courtesy of the farm-linked menu on Real Time Farms. Eaters can find this menu on Real Time Farms as well as embedded on each restaurants' website.
Five time James Beard award nominee, Chef Alex Young, of Zingermans Roadhouse, shares: "Real Time Farms gives our customers the ability to see and learn why we choose the products we choose."
Created by a team of committed food nerds, headed by Karl Rosean, a former senior software engineer who helped to launch Google Android, Real Time Farms hit the cybersea in April 2010. Named by Food Inc, as "our new favorite website," Real Time Farms aims to become the most engaging and colorful food guide available, with unparalleled depth and breadth.
Real Time Farms catalyzes food transparency through its crowd-sourced data collection model and commitment to an open API (application programming interface). In layman's terms, this means that everyone contributes by sharing information, images, and soon video of farms, food artisans, and markets. Most data will be available for public use. Say you are a programmer, you can take Real Time Farms data and make a new app. Say you are a food blogger, you can use the data to make an engaging infographic on the sources that created your latest culinary triumph. As a social for-profit, Real Time Farms works for the people.
This honest narration of our food system allows everyone to trust the food they eat. As Kate Galassi, Forager & Operations for Compose says, "I'm glad somebody is finally doing this. It solves the problem of telling which restaurants have real integrity."