OpenAI spotlights West Michigan food company
From left to right: Seth Jorde, Chris Merendino | Photo courtesy of Locavana
OpenAI sent a film crew to West Michigan this month to tell the story of Zeeland-based Locavana and how the local food company is using artificial intelligence to help farmers and food producers reach customers.
The crew spent two days filming at Locavana’s Zeeland headquarters and visiting farms and customers across West Michigan. The resulting video highlights how Locavana has used AI to build technology supporting its local food marketplace and logistics operation.
Locavana was founded to address a persistent challenge in the local food system: Farmers and consumers may be located only a few miles apart, but moving food between them requires cold storage, inventory management, routing, ordering, payment processing, and other infrastructure traditionally supported by expensive software and large teams.
Locavana developed its own cold-chain logistics system, pop-up markets, and AI-powered tools to manage those challenges.
"A small business in 2026 has the same technology as a Fortune 500 company," said Chris Merendino, Co-founder and CEO of Locavana, in the video. "That wasn't true two years ago. It's true now, and it changes what a small farm in Michigan can be."
Locavana is now taking technology originally developed for its own operations and making it available to other farmers and food producers through Locavana for Producers. The platform brings growing, sales, order fulfillment, marketing, and accounting functions together in one system, giving operations such as vegetable farms and family-owned beef producers access to technology that has traditionally required multiple software platforms.
“Our mission has always been a more efficient food supply chain,” said Seth Jorde, Co-founder of Locavana. “Every dollar a farmer doesn’t spend fighting spreadsheets and paperwork is a dollar that goes back into the farm, and every hour saved is an hour spent farming. That’s how local food gets cheaper, fresher, and easier to find.”
Locavana currently operates in West Michigan and Chicagoland.
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