In today’s busy world, people don’t always have time for grocery shopping. Relay Foods has raised $8.25 million to do it for you.

Relay Foods is an online grocery service that currently operates in the Mid-Atlantic region. People shop online through a selection of inventory from local farms, artisan producers, and grocery stores. Relay Food gathers the order and delivers it to a pick-up spot or right to your door.

“Relay’s role in the grocery sector is one of host,” said cofounder and president Arnie Katz in an email. ”We connect growers and busy families, butchers and working moms, bakers and hardworking professionals. We add value to their relationships by increasing the transparency in the transaction. We want the farmers to be the celebrities promoting their foods, as it should be. Relay Foods is content simply to be the host that brings these two groups of people together under one roof.”

Relay’s has partnered with hundreds of merchants and the inventory is wide — be it baby food or chia seed power snacks. Shoppers can search for specific items, peruse all the offerings from a particular vendor, or look within tags like “antibiotic free” or “expectant mothers.” Clicking on a specific vendor yields their backstory. For example, if you want to buy blueberries from Agriberry Farm, you can learn that farmer Anne Geyer is committed to eco-friendly farming practices and is a lifelong berry-grower.

Quite the number of food delivery startups have cropped up over the past few years, using the Internet to connect food growers and makers with consumers in a more streamlined, far-reaching way. Larger retailers like Safeway, Amazon, Fresh Direct, and Peapod offer home delivery, while startups such as Mile High Organics, Good Eggs, and Farmigo deliver local, sustainable food to consumers in regional markets.

Relay Foods will use this financing to expand its service in the Washington, D.C. and Baltimore metro areas as well as drive expansion into Williamsburg, Virginia. The money will also accelerate development of a dedicated mobile platform, web redesign, and recruiting. Additionally, Relay will use the investment to add vehicles to its fleet and expand its food storage capacities as well as launch a commercial kitchen.

“Many people consider groceries to be the Bermuda Triangle of e-commerce — a place where investment dollars go but never return,” said CEO Zach Buckner. “Relay has some fairly compelling evidence to the contrary, however. Our key metrics are currently right-side-up, so we’re cranking up our bet, big time. We aren’t out of the woods yet, but I think we’re poised to do to traditional groceries what Netflix did to video rental stores.”

Grocery is a challenging sector because it is difficult to expand. Entering a new market is like starting fresh each time, because it requires establishing a whole new set of relationships with regional food producers. Furthermore, it can require operating separate vehicle fleets, warehouses, and refrigeration facilities in each area. As a result, investors are often wary of putting their money into this space.

Relay, however, does not currently have this problem. This $8.25 million brings Relay’s total capital raised to $14.25 million. Participating investors include Battery Venutres and TomorrowVentures. Relay Foods is based in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Photo credit: Relay Foods

Fquare is a company that helps investors customize and manage their land investment portfolio, and today it announced that it’s launching a crowdfunding initiative to feed the hungry. Food may be everywhere in America, but it is not always affordable. With 15 percent of the country living below the poverty line, many families cannot afford to buy nutritious ingredients, and too many children are underfed, obese, and/or hungry.

Fquare seeks to remedy this issue with a service people can use to donate money to buy local farms. It rents these out to area farmers who instead of paying cash for rent pay with donated food by delivering the harvest to local food banks. In theory, farmers get access to additional farm land at no monetary cost, and food banks receive farm-grown products.

This initiative seeks to make investing in land about more than just financial gains and income. Ultimately, farms are about food and feeding people, and Fquare is giving people who invest in farmland the opportunity to give back to the agricultural community and fill food banks as well as bank accounts.

We talk a lot about investing in Silicon Valley and occasionally about investments in farming-related startups, but investment in actual land is generally outside the scope of tech-focused portfolios. Land may not be as sexy as software and social media, but it is a fairly stalwart place to place money. However, it often involves a certain degree of upkeep. Fquare hellps accredited investors become co-owners of farmland and then managed farmland investments on their behalf.

Fquare is based in New York. Read the press release. 

Photo Credit: iluvcocacola/Flickr

FarmLogs is a Y Combinator alum that seeks to modernize the farming industry. Today, the company based out of Ann Arbor, Mich., announced it’s harvesting $1 million in seed funding, which is led by Huron River Ventures and Hyde Park Ventures.

FarmLogs’ software that helps farmers manage their farm. It offers a wide range of features, including the capability to forecast and measure profits, track activities and expenses, monitor crop progress, manage inventory and sales, monitor weather, study field performance, and stay on top of crop markets and relevant news. The platform also provides analytical tools to help farmers take a more data-driven approach to agriculture.

Founder and CEO Jesse Vollmar grew up on a farm in Michigan and studied computer science. He experienced first-hand many of the inefficiencies in the farming world that led to lower yields and profits, and he set out to solve the problem.

“FarmLogs is about bringing innovation to an industry that desperately needs it,” he said. “We have an amazing opportunity to make a significant impact on the entire globe by serving the people that feed our world.”

Instead of keeping records with paper, farmers can now manage operations and conduct business via the web or mobile. Row crop farmers, who grow corn, soybeans, wheat, and such can see a daily snapshot of their farm’s performance from a central dashboard, and they can update information from the field using the GPS-enabled mobile app.

With this investment, FarmLogs will expand its team of four and accelerate development of mobile applications for the 2013 planting season.

As much as I would like to regularly patronize a farmer’s market, time, location, and availability often stand in my way. Farmigo is opening a farmer’s market platform today which connects farmers with local communities to make procuring fresh, seasonal, local products as easy as possible. The company also announced securing $8 million in financing.

Farmigo started in 2009 as an online software provider to help farms manage their Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs. By subscribing to a CSA programs, people can receive weekly boxes of produce directly from the farmers. Their popularity has increased over the years with the growth of the slow food movement and awareness surrounding healthy eating practices, but there was no software system to help the farmers track their operations.

Founder Benzi Ronen spent years working at enterprise software corporation SAP and left in 2000 to start his own companies. After having their first daughter, Ronen and his wife began to play closer attention to the food they ate as a family and grew familiar with the obstacles that existed for distributing local, seasonal, sustainable food. He set out to apply his logistics and software background to this market which was for the most part, devoid of technology.

“I saw that our food system is broken- this is making us sicker as people and making our planet sicker,” he said in an interview. “It isn’t that we need a shift in the industrial food system, we need to create a new food system based on different principles, and that alternative system needs infrastructure. We are already seeing an uptick in the number of local farms and CSA programs and the younger generation is getting back to farming. Now is the perfect time to introduce the consumer side to make eating farm fresh food more convenient.”

And thus, the team set out to create an online marketplace that eliminates the friction from buying fresh-from-harvest food. Farmigo takes a community-focused approach. Groups of people band together around a common location, like a workplace, school, or public meeting place. Through Farmigo’s network, they have access to a customized online farmer’s market, with a range of seasonal fruit, vegetables, eggs, meats, fish, baked goods, dairy, and even wine and coffee. Every week, each member of the community places an order and the orders are delivered at the same time and same place for pickup. This model offers convenience and variety, without sacrificing the degree of quality of sustainability.

“Only 1% of the population participates in CSAs, and that one-to-one relationship with the farm means you are limited to specifically what they grew that week,” he said. “Our mission was to make healthy food accessible to all households while also preserving the community feeling of farmer’s markets. We are about an economy of community instead of an economy of scale. We want the community members to rise up and be a part of the solution.”

To set up a Farmigo initiative, each community needs a “champion” to spearhead the effort. Groups must consist of 30 people or more, spending roughly $20 each. It has taken off within the startup community and early adopters include companies like Kiva, Etsy, and Carrot Creative.

“We are finding that young companies between 100 to 500 employees tend to have the spirit of willingness to try new things, they are the early adopters of the corporate world,” Ronen said. “In these companies, creativity and entrepreneurship are welcome and we are seeing that companies are starting to innovate around this. Many are integrating it into their health and wellness programs, using Farmigo credits as rewards for achieving milestones, and hold cooking competitions or recipe sharing events.”

Setting up a Farmigo community is currently available in Northern California and New York City. In conjunction with the initiative’s launch, Farmigo also announced the $8 million investment to continue spreading its platform nationwide. This is a hefty round for a food startup, which Ronen attributes to the company’s emphasis on the “non-sexy side of food.”

Farmigo’s back end enables farms to track what they are harvesting, manage their orders, organize distribution and packing, and facilitate delivery. This consumer-facing side closes the whole loop and investors trust in the potential for stability and growth. This second round was led by Sherbrooke Capital and RSF Social Finance, and joined by Benchmark Capital, which led the Series A of $2 million in 2009.