Neat!
But you've got some work to do to get the data in there. I put in my Southern Indiana zip code and got 12 results back. Only one was actually anywhere near my zipcode (or even in my state). The rest were anywhere from 200 - 500 miles away. Sorry, but I don't consider Maryland to be local to Indiana.
I would suggest you work on getting data about local farms in there, and then tighten up the constraints for what is considered "local".
At the very least, in the results paragraph, change the display from "12 for your zipcode" which is just flatly false to "1 for your zipcode and 11 in the broader region" or something of that nature.
Just a small detail: The large subscription form popping up after a search made me think there are no results initially. Maybe make sure the results are higher up, and e.g. move the subscription form to the side?
Also, a softer (lighter?) background might bring out the fruit/vegetable images a bit better.
My visual experience:
1. There is a field to enter zipcode and empty space below.
2. I enter zipcode.
3. Empty space filled with fields for an email and name and a "we found results banner".
4. Because all the results were off my screen I figured it was nothing more than another email harvesting page.
5. Later I saw it on the front page of HN and tried it again. It still looked like an email harvesting page on my laptop. Only because I had seen the comments did I think it might be possible to scroll down.
It might be worth delivering value (results) before asking for value (a visitor's email). Fresh fruits near me is awesome. Signing up for email isn't.
Good luck.
I like this! This was an idea I toyed around with in my head for a long time. I am glad to see you actually implement it.
One suggestion I have is this: it would be great if there was a way to "peek" ahead and see what other items will soon be coming into season within the next 1-2 weeks.
Very nice! Next step: steer users to where they can get the produce. I would suggest teaming up with Community Supported Agriculture [1] where people can buy stuff right off the farm with subscription.
I get that you don't want to show mostly empty pages(but that's going to happen most places in November), but 500+ miles seems to be stretching the definition of near. Being in Tennessee, I don't know that I'd consider various citrus fruits 572 miles in Florida to be very helpful.
No, not quite accurate -- the only results it returned are apples and cherries. Apples are 100% correct. Cherries are not. And there are a plethora of squashes and pumpkins recently harvested, as we just had our first frost last week, so the list is clearly incomplete.
<input type=number pattern="\d*"> on the ZIP code field would be fantastic for your mobile users. (At least until you support non-US zips)
https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/design-and-ux...
Nice work. Worth mentioning prior art:
Harvest: https://itunes.apple.com/app/harvest-select-best-produce/id3...
Seasons: http://www.seasonsapp.com/
Locavore: http://www.getlocavore.com/
How can I use this to help me eat locally? I put in my zip code for Raleigh, NC (27601), and it gives me a result of: Cabbage in Pasquotank County, but there is no contact information. How can I get some of that cabbage?
Awesome idea. My zip (59718, MT) shows 250 miles away as the nearest food. Definitely as others have pointed out, needs a lot more data to be viable. If you are to take this more seriously, maybe target a single community and connect with local farms, i.e. https://www.strikefarms.com/
Would love to share this with my non-tech friends, but the data's just not there yet, and sharing with them would ruin their impression forever. Data is too sparse with respect to geography. No idea how you get the data, but increase your data density as a function of location, and you'll likely see wide adoption.
The results are kind of confusing. If I put in zip code 22003 (not mine, but close, and the results are the same) it tells me "1 Result from Georgia" which is bell peppers from a place 611 miles away, then "10 Results from other states" including one place 14 miles away, and another 36 miles away.
The wording seems to imply that it thinks 22003 is in Georgia and the top result is the best, but it's in Virginia and the top result is the most distant one.
I'd also suggest making the on-page results a bit more prominent. My first reaction after typing a zip code was that I was required to give an e-mail address to view the results, and nearly gave up and left the page before realizing they were also displayed at the bottom. (The fact that only the "1 Result from Georgia" was above the fold didn't help, since it looked unrelated.)
This is great - cool idea. I'll register as this is something I really care about and this saves me research and time. It also helps me consider which meals I'd like to make.
I'd be willing to pay a small monthly fee for this data being curated for me when you get the database a bit more fleshed out.
This is a great resource. Thanks for sharing it!
I have a suggestion which would make it very useful for me: hints on when to plant. Since you have the timing for "peak season" and (I assume) the growing times to get there, hopefully it would be easy to work backwards to arrive at planting times.
As a new gardener in Southern California, I could use some help planning my planting schedule. I can get away with planting a lot of things whenever I feel like it, but sticking with the ideal times would help optimize my yields.
About five years ago, a colleague had an idea for a social/user-driven app for seasonal food (produce, meats, etc.) He called it something like Local Bee, and then we created a version (for Windows Phone 7!) of it over the weekend at a Hack-a-thon. We actually won, though it was small (13 teams). We called it P2P Farms! We made another version (for Android Auto, before it was even called that) at another event, where it would actually alert you right in your dashboard when you got close to specified items. Then our employer started to turn it into "a real thing", and renamed it Fresh! However, I left the company around then and haven't heard much about it since.
At the time, I searched online, and found sites like LocalHarvest, Farmstand, RipeNear.me, LocalDirt, etc., each usually with a little different spin (some focus on specific food, some one farmer's markets, some on actual farms, and some on produce stands).
So you can see the challenges - data, use case, implementation, monetization, etc.
If it's from various feeds, they aren't standardized or consistent. They could update at different frequencies. They might omit huge swaths of geography.
If it's from the users themselves (i.e. you "check-in" when you find a local produce stand selling fruit or beef jerky or something), you need MASSIVE adoption and participation, and you'll probably have a 10-to-1 ratio of people that want to consume vs contribute. And how long is the data useful? Maybe they bought awesome watermelons but 15 minutes later, the last few sold out. Can you get people at the stands to update their listings?
What if you convince producers (farmer's markets, farmers) that it's worth their marketing dollars to get listed (and highlighted)? Does it follow the spirit of the app you envisioned?
And do you combine approaches? Multiple ways of getting data in, keeping it updated, etc? I'm curious where you'll take this, so create an "About/News" section of your site (or Twitter) and keep posting!
Edit: Also, I realize your approach "just what fruit is in season" varies from the above variations, and so the challenges and solutions do as well. I kind of went off on tangents there! Hopefully it gives you ideas anyway.
Love it. Might want to update the meta tags to remove the mention of the "preact-boilerplate." That's some prime real estate for describing your site when sharing it socially.
Very neat idea. I'd like to make the following suggestions:
1) Some vendors of said produce. If I can get grapes that were grown 5 miles away, awesome! Now where can I buy them?
2) A filter that lets me determine the maximum distance allowed. I ran a search based on a Northern Virginia zipcode and it recommended me some Bell Peppers from Georgia...609 miles away. We're not exactly "local" at this point. Simply having a filter option to stop it from showing me anything farther than 50 miles away would be useful.
3 thumbs up!
As soon as my wife heard about it - voice of joy!
Definitely solution to existing problem + tons of potentials for business (recipes, partnerships with stores, organics, deliveries)..
Nifty, thanks for sharing!
Couple of suggestions:
I signed up for the email, but I'd likely pay more attention to a monthly email as personally I get so many "weekly" email that I setup a filter consciously or not.
Second, `being` is misspelled in your post-signup message: "confirmation link to being receiving fresh produce notifications once a week." Might even be good to reword it a bit .:-)
I love the concept. Rather than just listing what's 'in' season, listing what's out (among staples, fuzzy definition of what that would include) would be valuable to.
My wife tends to give me a grocery list and includes things that - when i get to the store, are overpriced/look like crap as they're significantly out of season anywhere remotely close.
Hey! Very cool.
I visited the local farmer's market yesterday. Every 3rd stall had persimmons... Didn't see any in my Santa Clara County list.
Not sure if it is my ignorance here, but I was actually pretty happy with the results for my zip in southern CA. There are certainly results that are not convenient traveling distance from me, but the value to me isn't in knowing exactly which farms to purchase from, but in knowing what produce I should look more closely at when I go to the market.
Where is the data coming from? It tells me that things like apples, pears, etc. are at peak ripeness (true) - but then it says the closest places are 50 miles away. I know for a fact that there are numerous apple and pear farms that are open to the public within a few miles of my house (they are problem in the same zip code as my house).
Good stuff! Would totally install a native app that sent me pushes when things go in/out of season.
Your zip database is old. My zip returns nothing (97078) but the old zip they split up works (97007).
For the UK, I use http://eattheseasons.co.uk/ which is much simpler, but serves as a great starting point when considering what to cook.
Thank you for this site. Wonderful!
One correction: 'Cantaloups' should be spelled 'Cantaloupes'.
It would be really nice to have the tags clickable (for example 'Peak', so that we can figure out what produce would be cheaper).
Looks like a very neat idea.
I'm curious where the data comes from. For my zipcode (souther New Hampshire) it said apples are in peak season. Peak Apple around here ends early to late October (depending on weather).
Very cool would it be possible to get a reminder of when something is in season to plant as well, this would be very helpful with my home vegetable gardening efforts.
I’d love to see this integrated with https://fallingfruit.org/
This is awesome. It would be nice to have a list of local farms that produce them, as well as farmers markets that offer them (when and where)
I get wildly different out-of-state results when putting in 99114 vs 99113, even though both zips are in the same starting state. What gives?
This is great! Thank you. Lots of great feedback here as well :) Look forward to following along and making more informed grocery choices.
You can generally figure out what's in season by going to the grocery store and seeing what they have a mountain of for almost no money
I showed this to my wife who has never been on HN and is an avid Gardener. I was excited to find some commonality in our hobbies!
She spent three minutes on it and said “this is crap.”
When she entered our Dallas zip code, it noted that the nearest harvests for very basic veggies was over 270 miles away in the middle of no where. Meanwhile she’s growing the very same plants in our backyard.
Gardening is far from my area of expertise. But unless we’re missing something fundamental about the program, there may be some work to be done on this commendable project.
LOVE THIS!!! I have actually printed out charts and put them on our bulletin board, however, not all charts are local.
Next question: Is this public code?
This is nice. I'd love to see this expanded as I am sure there are more than just 4 fruits in season right now in Oregon. :)
Very cool idea! Agree with the comments tying this to a Farmer's Market somehow. Would be good to get user input as well.
I love it! So awesome.
I'd love to make a mobile app for it. Is it an abuse if I just pinged https://harvestsignal.com/api/v1/public/whatsfresh/[zip code]? I don't want to spam you but I doubt I'll have any traffic any time soon anyway.
6 things within a 300 mile radius and the combination does not form a complete protein...
Nice 90210 reference :-) here's hoping for some data to brazilian visitors...
Very cool, I always wondered about things like this but it was verrry low priority
Very interesting! Can you talk a little bit about the reliability of your data?
...congrats bruuv...wanted to build something similar lack of time killed it
Very cool!
Also lucky to be in a west coast state with lots of rain and lots of agriculture.
>Artichoke
>Days left in season: 253
Artichokes, man. You just can't convince them to die.
200+ miles away. Holy hell. Are the farms really that far away?
A great start! So exciting to keep an eye on this
Super cool - awesome idea and great UI.
This is awesome! Nice work :)
Love it!
Can you add planting dates. Some way incorporate or allow user to access the corresponding planting dates of the fruit or veggie.
I.e., broccoli: in peak season - planting dates July-September.
My app Ripen is similar. We just began accepting beta testers. Ripen is a crowd sourced produce stand discovery app. Users add produce and produce stands. They add reviews for specific produce as well as an overall grade for the stand for service reviews. If anyone is interested in being part of beta let me know.
> Chile Peppers > Chaves County, New Mexico (607 miles) > In peak season
I guess there's a reason we call this hunting season... deer, turkey,pheasent, quail, dove plus many non-game animals (hogs, etc) are in season in the midwest.
Great work! Sorting by days left (asc/dec) or alphabetical would be nice.
Very cool. Not sure if your motivation is to "promote local eating" or if you're trying to build a cool product that would bring in some cash... but if you're looking to monetize, I'd pay a small amount (about the cost of a magazine) for a HIGH-QUALITY set of recipe suggestions that use 6 ingredients or less, and take ~1hr to cook. (because I cook for a family every day, I don't have all day to cook, and I don't want to buy 100 ingredients I'll only use once)
The last point is important to me. Food porn is common these days, they put out these recipes with beautiful pictures, but the recipe is so impractical I'll probably never make it. Frankly, if I never make the recipe... it's of little added value to me.