BUY LOCAL-ONLINE

In 2006, the husband-and-wife team of Irv Cernauskas and Shelly Herman founded Fresh Picks, an online store delivering groceries to customers’ doorsteps. While the grocery delivery service Peapod preceded Fresh Picks (and Instacart would come along six years later), the couple’s business model had a distinctly regional flair.

Over time, they developed relationships with independent farms across the Midwest that provided produce, dairy products, meat, and other staples. The idea, says Benjamin Harrison, a veteran of the food industry who purchased Fresh Picks in 2021, is to build up local suppliers by meeting consumer’s growing demand to buy local food.

Harrison says Fresh Picks was initially more of an online farmers market that provided an outlet for local growers to sell their products online as they would in the open air. Now, however, the business has evolved into an online marketplace where individuals and families can get most, if not all, of what they need every week.

“We are a platform for fresh, local, and healthy food,” Harrison says. The fact that Chicago is in the upper Midwest, one of the most robust food systems in the world, makes it a perfect hub for a business such as Fresh Picks.”

“We talk to a lot of consumers and when they think of a farmers market they think of produce,” observes Harrison. “Yet, we look at it from the entire perspective of grocery. All the major categories of food are grown, produced, or raised in our area, so what once was an online farmers market has now evolved into a personalized, curated grocery service.”

Fresh Picks works not only with ranchers and farmers but also chefs, brewers, and manufacturers. The company seeks to offer everything its customers might want in their grocery baskets.

“Fresh Picks is a self-contained operation,” says Harrison. “We manage our own supply chain, source everything ourselves, and have it delivered to us locally. Our employees pack orders six days a week, and our drivers deliver six days a week.”

Harrison says as he and the Fresh Picks team grow the business, he plans on broadening it to offer an even deeper assortment of products. The company currently delivers to more than 180 zip codes in the Chicago region, including Barrington, and processes a few hundred orders a day, give or take.

“We want to be a powerful engine that benefits the local economy,” Harrison explains.

Visit freshpicks.com to place an order or to learn more.