Permanent wants to permanently change where commercial buyers get their food

During COVID-19, Wiley Webb embarked on a year-long trip with his wife to try to figure out the most pressing issues in the food system. He talked to people at more than 70 farms and consistently heard that they wanted more buyers. Large buyers told Webb they wanted to find these farm suppliers but couldn’t because procurement is slow and opaque.

Webb decided to build the missing piece. “Despite trillions of dollars of trade, and all the sophistication, buyers of food struggled to find and onboard new suppliers,” Webb said. “The core question that holds back our food system from the level of transparency that it deserves is how hard the question of availability combined with logistics is for every single item we eat and transport.”

Webb founded Permanent as a B Corp in 2022 and launched its marketplace in 2023. The company seeks to be a new type of food distributor focused on connecting commercial buyers to farms that use regenerative farming practices — a type of farming that aims to conserve and rehabilitate soil, water, and plant systems — or those owned by diverse farmers. Large corporate buyers browse Permanent to see what they can order that’s in season and grown locally, as ordering in-season produce from such farms helps them cut distribution costs.

There is an AI angle here, too, of course. The company’s AI layers help it predict what will be in season at a given point in the year and how it will fit into existing distribution and supply chains.

“It’s the job of procurement people everywhere to find and reliably get better foods and better prices,” Webb said. “We reach out with that offering, often customized with what the business is looking for.”

Permanent also helps facilitate custom growing contracts. Salad chain Sweetgreen has used the platform for this, Webb said, to switch its sweet potato source from a large commercial farm to a small women-owned farm that will be transitioning to organic in the coming years.

Since the company’s launch in 2023, it has worked with 60 farms in California, 50% of which are owned by a woman or a person of color, and has landed 20 commercial customers. Some customers are well-known brands like Sweetgreen or broth company, Kettle & Fire, while others are sizable school districts like Oakland’s and large universities.

The company just raised a $3.7 million seed round led by Better Tomorrow Ventures with participation from Atman Capital, Autopilot and Gaingels, among others. Webb said the company will use the capital to augment its supply chain and its sales and technology teams, and expand its supply chain across the U.S. Permanent is largely focused on the West Coast, especially California, but Webb said the company’s reach is expanding and he hopes it will be national by 2027.

While the company wants to promote regenerative and organic farming practices, Webb is realistic about where the food market is today and what supply and demand looks like. The company has turned down potential suppliers and keeps its definition of regenerative farming pretty loose.

“Regenerative is broad enough, and our customers and the demand we are serving is broad enough. We do work with large commercial enterprises for many programs, while we work with very small, Spanish-speaking immigrant entrepreneurs for many other programs,” Webb said.

The company plans to add financial features in the future, too, like lending and cash-flow management. But for now, Permanent is looking to expand its supply chain and footprint.

“We think about scale and expansion through anchoring around our customer demand and unique needs, and creating both local and distance programs,” Webb said. “We are ultimately flexible to optimize around our customer needs for the most competitive delivered pricing, and that enables us to develop supply and de-commodify and differentiate items in the process.”