Why it dies

The distributor you're 'cutting out' isn't a middleman skimming rent — it's a logistics company solving the problem you're about to discover the hard way: aggregating 40 tiny farm orders, cold-chaining them, and delivering to a chef who needs 6am consistency, not a chatty founder's promise. That's why Sysco exists and why Good Eggs, Farmigo, and a graveyard of farm-to-restaurant startups torched nine figures learning it. You have the classic two-sided cold-start with the two lowest-margin, most cash-strapped, least tech-adoptive customers in America — a farmer who wants a phone call and a restaurant that switches vendors over a $4 case price. Your take rate has to be tiny to matter to either side, and tiny take rate on perishable low-ticket produce means you're delivering arugula at a loss while spending real money on trucks and spoilage.

What would save it

Stop being a marketplace and become the logistics layer for a single dense city + single product category where local premium is real (specialty greens, mushrooms, dairy for high-end kitchens). Own one cold-chain route, sign 15 restaurants that will pay a markup for provenance, and prove you can hit 6am delivery reliably before you ever say the word 'marketplace' again. If you can't name your first 10 restaurants and the exact route between them, you don't have a startup — you have a slogan.