Farmthru: how a regenerative farmer built a grocery store that actually knows its farmers

Rachel Ward didn't plan to take on the supermarket duopoly. She planned to fix her soil.

The filmmaker and actor turned regenerative-farming advocate spent years rebuilding the land at her farm - rotational grazing, keeping the ground covered, cutting synthetic chemicals, coaxing life back into pastures that decades of conventional farming had stripped bare. And somewhere in that process she ran into a frustration millions of Australians share from the other end: the food she was producing - better for the land, better for the animals, and frankly better tasting - reached the customer indistinguishable from a factory-farmed product, at a price that rewarded none of the care that went into it.

Farmers, as she has put it, are price takers. They wear the cost of doing things properly and get no premium for good stewardship of the land. Meanwhile the shopper at the checkout has no real way to know whose food they're buying or how it was grown. Two problems, one broken middle. Farmthru is the bridge built to fix it.

A genuinely different grocery model

Farmthru is a new kind of grocery store: farm-direct, regenerative, and priced for everyday families rather than the top end of town. The idea is disarmingly simple - connect households directly to the farmers growing their food, and cut out everything in between.

Customers order online, then either collect from Farmthru's hub in Brookvale, on Sydney's northern beaches, in a five-minute drive-thru pickup, or have their order delivered. There's no membership fee. There are no supermarket markups. And every product is traceable to the farm that produced it - each partner farm a real place, with real people, raising animals on pasture and putting quality before shortcuts. No middlemen, no guesswork: straight from the farm, to the hub, to your kitchen.

To build it, Ward teamed up with food-distribution veterans Mathieu Jamet and Sean Miller - the operational muscle to turn a values-driven idea into a working supply chain. It's a deliberate pairing: a founder who understands the land and the farmers, and a team that understands how to move food efficiently from one to the other.

The numbers behind the mission

Plenty of ethical-food ventures have foundered on the gap between good intentions and good economics. What makes Farmthru compelling is that the early commercial signals are genuinely strong.

Since launching in late 2025, Farmthru's monthly revenue has more than doubled in five months. The average basket sits at $186 - a number that tells you this isn't bargain-bin grocery; it's customers doing a real, considered shop and coming back to do it again. And in a detail that quietly validates the entire model, more than 75% of orders are hub collections rather than deliveries. People are choosing to drive to Brookvale to pick up their food, which keeps logistics costs down and proves the drive-thru hub is working exactly as designed.

It's the kind of repeat behaviour that's hard to fake and expensive to buy. In a category where trust is everything, Farmthru's customers keep returning - not out of charity, but because the food is clean, the prices are fair, and they know where it came from.

Taking on a $140 billion duopoly

The opportunity Farmthru is chasing is enormous, and the timing is pointed. Australian grocery is a category worth more than $140 billion a year, and Coles and Woolworths together hold around 65% of it (ACCC, 2025). Shoppers have watched prices climb more than 20% over five years while the major chains face ongoing scrutiny over their discounting practices.

Into that frustration steps a model the majors structurally can't match: a direct line to the farmer, full traceability, regenerative sourcing, and prices set without the layers of markup a national supermarket carries. Farmthru isn't trying to be a bigger supermarket. It's trying to be the thing supermarkets quietly stopped being - a place where you actually know your farmer. The wider world is noticing, too: Farmthru is set to feature on the ABC's Australian Story in May 2026, a national platform for a story that resonates well beyond the northern beaches.

A raise the community got behind

When Farmthru opened its equity crowdfunding campaign on Birchal - seeking between $500,000 and $2.5 million - the response made the point better than any pitch deck could. The company passed its minimum target and closed having raised $810,966 from 478 investors, with the team thanking the backers who, in their words, helped prove that farm-direct grocery could work and that it mattered to people.

That capital goes toward the things a young, fast-growing retailer needs most: expanding the hub model, growing the network of partner farms, and continuing to build out Farmthru's technology platform so the experience scales without losing the traceability that defines it.

Crowdfunding suits Farmthru almost perfectly. This is a business whose entire premise is reconnecting people with the source of their food. Letting those same people become part-owners - turning customers into shareholders with a direct stake in the mission - isn't a marketing flourish. It's the model, applied to the company itself.

Better food, in more neighbourhoods

Farmthru's ambition is bigger than one hub on the northern beaches. The vision is more genuinely good food in more neighbourhoods - more partner farms rewarded for farming well, more families able to buy clean, traceable food at fair prices, and a grocery model that proves you don't have to choose between affordability and integrity.

It started with one farmer trying to do right by her soil and getting no credit for it at the checkout. It's becoming a way for thousands of households to know exactly who grew their food - and, now, to own a piece of the company changing how it gets to them.

You can explore Farmthru's profile on Birchal.

This article is general information only and is not financial advice or an offer of securities. Past campaign performance is not indicative of future results. Investing in early-stage companies involves significant risk, including the loss of your investment. Always read the relevant CSF offer document and the general CSF risk warning before investing.