Genevieve Priebe spent two decades as a high-level tech consultant for companies like Microsoft and Boeing. After taking over her family farm in Montana, she discovered a hard truth. Small-scale food producers often lose money, and the existing supply chain makes it difficult for them to reach local customers. She left the corporate world to start Reroot, a platform designed to bridge that gap.
Reroot operates a marketplace where farmers, ranchers, and bakers sell directly to their communities. Priebe built the platform as a solo founder, using modern tools to manage inventory and sales without a large development team. Her goal is to make buying local food as simple as purchasing goods from any other online retailer.
The startup recently launched a free companion app that maps over 50,000 food producers across the United States and Canada. Priebe also introduced a tool called Walk and Talk, which allows farmers to update their inventory by voice while they are in the fields, even when they lack a reliable cell signal. This technology simplifies administrative tasks for farmers who are already managing thin margins.
Priebe is bootstrapping the company to remain focused on serving her customers directly. She ignores advice to bring on a technical co-founder, choosing instead to ship features quickly and iterate based on real feedback. By removing marketing hurdles for small producers, she hopes to make the business of farming viable for the next generation of growers.