In Their Words: Doorganics' Mike Hughes

Mike Hughes is the founder and CEO of Doorganics, a farm-to-table grocery delivery service based in Michigan. Established in 2011, Doorganics currently services the metro Detroit and Grand Rapids areas and delivers about 50,000 pounds of produce a month to its customers. In 2019, the company was acquired by GrubMarket, an online retailer and wholesaler of farm-fresh products and other healthy foods. OPN recently caught up with Mike to chat about his company’s close relationships with local farms, the effectiveness of storytelling as a marketing strategy, how COVID-19 has dramatically increased his company’s sales, and more.

What led you to start Doorganics?

I founded Doorganics in 2011 because as a busy professional, I found it difficult to make it to the farmers market on Saturday mornings, and I thought it would be pretty interesting to have some fresh, locally grown produce delivered to my door. That service didn’t exist at that time in Grand Rapids, so I set out to create it with one farm partner and a borrowed delivery van. Immediately, the market was very interested, and we realized just how much we had to do in order to provide a service that met the needs and demands of our prospective customers. And so we began to build Doorganics into what it ultimately is today—a highly curated grocery shopping experience with a focus on local and organic products.

How much of Doorganics’ produce is certified organic? 

So everything that we bring in that’s not from a local Michigan grower is always certified organic. And then I’d say during the Michigan harvest season (June-November), it’s 50 percent certified organic and 50 percent chemical-free/sustainable—the latter being basically very small farms without the certification that we know personally.

What are your sourcing methods for local produce, and how important are your relationships with the local farms you source from? 

We have personal relationships with every local farm that we source from, and we’re working with them year-round. We do seed planning with them to start the year. We do weekly updates with them as they start their seeds in the greenhouse and as they transplant to the field. We’re talking weather and growing conditions with them on a sometimes daily basis. We’re constantly in the loop, and we’re really along for the ride with them, and we make certain that they take organic growing methods very seriously.

So essentially you do production planning with them?

We do, absolutely. We work with the farms to do more of what customers like and to scale back when things don’t move as well because there are a lot of trends when it comes to produce that we’ve noticed, and it’s important to us and important to our farmers that we can sell the majority of what they’re growing.

What are some of the produce trends you’ve noticed?

Back in the early days, kale was super popular, and it remains popular, but we’ve seen a slight decrease in interest. Now we’re seeing celery have its big moment with the celery juicing trend. We have people calling us for whole cases of celery for juicing— we’re selling a lot of celery!

We’ve also seen consistent growth in the interest in heirloom tomatoes and heirloom-variety anything, so people are really interested in the unique stuff and in trying something new. For instance, patty pan squash is very popular and so are lemon cucumbers.

Do you have a chance to visit your local farm partners pretty frequently?

We do! One of the most fun and enjoyable aspects of the job is getting out and seeing the farmers that we’ve been working with. We film farm videos that we share through email and social media. We really like to tell the stories of our local farmers and the trials and tribulations and successes that they experience. We also have a print monthly newsletter. Obviously, we do email communications, but we feel like we set ourselves apart with an old-school monthly print newsletter in color telling farmer stories. It gives people something to tangibly open up and touch and feel and read with their deliveries. 

Did you employ storytelling as a marketing strategy from the get-go? And have you seen it positively impact consumer engagement? 

Yes, we did. We launched the business with a story—because every great business launches with a story—and that story was that we were going to deliver local, sustainably grown produce right to your doorstep from a farmer you know and trust. So at the beginning, we did a lot of storytelling, and we got a lot of media around that storytelling.

In terms of your non-local organic produce items, has your company’s acquisition by GrubMarket helped with your sourcing at all? 

Yes, it has. And we’re actively laying the groundwork for logistics because GrubMarket in California has such great grower relationships. They can source heirloom and specialty organic produce that is harder to find from the standard distributors that are servicing the Midwest currently. For example, earlier this year, we were able to get organic passion fruit and organic red walnuts. Our customers just love specialty items like those. So we’re trying to work out the logistics to make sourcing those items easier and less costly.

How has the COVID-19 situation been affecting your business?

After President Trump went on TV on March 13 and declared a national emergency, we took on a significant number of new customers over the next four or five days, and our sales tripled. At that point, we recognized that we needed to start putting new customers on a waitlist. And so we’ve had that waitlist in place for well over a month now, and we’ve just started accepting some customers from it.

The amount of shopping that’s happening on Doorganics has also increased tremendously from an average-order-size perspective— our average order size is up 55 percent. And we’ve had some customers asking us to fulfill $1,000-plus orders on a weekly basis.

What are Doorganics’ plans for the future?

Our future plans are to continue to lean into the local supply chain. We’ve always believed in the importance of a strong local food system, but with this COVID-19 pandemic, we believe in it even more now. And so we’re going to continue to lean into building and growing our local relationships to support Michigan agriculture. We’ll do that by expanding our delivery areas and by adding more local products to our offerings.