When we started Foodzie a little over a year ago, we knew that attitudes about food were shifting… people care to know more about the food they’re eating; particularly who’s making it, and where it comes from. So we set out to create a community that would make it easy for food artisans to sell their products directly to consumers, and for foodies to learn about and share the products they love.

Very simply… we believe that we’ll succeed by putting our focus on our community of buyers and sellers. We’ve determined that the best way for us to do this is to leverage an equally vibrant open-source community to help us build the core functionality of Foodzie.

Although we’re very much a technology company, we want to concentrate on making the technology disappear behind a seamless user experience that encourages discovery of extraordinary products, and personal connections with the passionate people and small businesses that make those products.

Some of the things that you’ll notice about the new Foodzie:

New Branding: Foodzie has a whole new look. Inspired by the authenticity of our passionate food makers, you’ll notice more illustrations, a new logo, and a complete site redesign.

Better Site Structure: We want to make it’s easier for you to discover great products and producers, so you’ll find that we’ve improved the flow through the marketplace, put more emphasis on product filters, and geo tagged every product to make it easier for you to support your local artisans.

Stronger More Extensible Platform: The biggest change of all is under the hood. Foodzie is now built on one of the most robust and well-architected eCommerce platforms around. This will afford us the flexibility to quickly iterate on the Foodzie Marketplace. It will also provide our sellers with advanced tools and analytics to better manage their Foodzie shops. You can read more of the technical details in Nik’s post.

Here at Foodzie, our entire product development is driven by your feedback. Tell us what you like. Tell us what you don’t like. We’re really enthusiastic to hear your thoughts!