Tucked near the Avondale Brewing Company and Saw’s in Avondale, Freshfully is a strictly local food grocery store that provides fresh, off-the-farm produce six days a week.
Freshfully has farmers deliver in-season fruits and vegetables, local grass-fed beef and lamb, pastured pork, free-range chicken and Gulf shrimp.
Owners Jen Barnett and Sam Brasseale founded Freshfully in 2011 and opened the storefront on May 1. Both wanted easier access to fresh, local food, but couldn’t seem to find a steady source. In response, they decided to open their own operation to provide the greater Birmingham community with easy access to fresh food.
“We saw the need and created the idea, it was as simple as that,” Barnett says. “Not to say it hasn’t been a work in progress, but we have had a lot of help. When we first opened, we had about 500 heads of lettuce and not much else.”
The most unique part of Freshfully, however, is not what it provides in the store, but what the website offers.
They connect customers with weekly or monthly produce boxes that can be picked up from any approved pick-up location near the customer’s area. Urban Cookhouse, O’Henry’s Coffee at Brookwood and Icing on the Cookie are just a few stops in Freshfully’s network.
“We are both pretty big web nerds, so the functionality of our website was the first and easiest order of business for us,” Barnett says. “When we launched the site in November of 2011, we had about 50 products for sale and it took off with surprising speed! The biggest affirmation came when we had customers that weren’t relatives or just friends of ours.”
For more information or to locate pick-up locations for produce boxes, visit freshfully.com.