Tania Green would always get “horrible PMS symptoms.” Living in the North End, she often turned to the various neighborhood bakeries to satisfy her cravings for “thick, dense, moist baked goods like a brownie or a rich indulgent chocolate cake.” She found, however, that during the time that she experienced PMS symptoms, that she “was not making the right food decisions.”

In 2014, Neheet Trivedi was “interested in building a company in the food and ag sector.” At the time, however, he was unsure what this company was going to be. He considered “restaurants, food delivery, food distribution, food waste, and other topics,” but ultimately it was the fortunate timing of his sister’s pregnancy that led to the founding of Real Food Solutions (RFS), maker of the Anchor Nutrition Bar.

When you picture “locavore,” what imagery comes to mind? You probably picture someone eating a fresh, colorful array of farmer’s market vegetables, each of which are namely grown locally. At Branchfood, we love our fresh veggies just as much as anyone, but we believe being a ‘locavore’ extends beyond shopping the local farmers markets.

Here at Branchfood we offer co-working space for food startups that believe collaboration and education are the keys to successful entrepreneurship. Below are just a few of our resident companies and the people who make them so great.

In April 2013, Canadian 30-Under-30 winner Caithrin Rintoul co-founded Provender, an online platform that connects food producers and local buyers, garnering significant support and facilitating millions of dollars in transactions. The virtual marketplace is a welcome opportunity in an industry not often associated with innovation -- North America's aging farms. Branchfood sat down with Rintoul to discuss Provender's business model and the rapidly-changing food+tech world.

A veteran of the food industry, Eli Feldman knows restaurants. His company, Clothbound, stems directly from the challenges of building a strong staff. Through an easy-to-use app, the service connects candidates with job offers, facilitating the process on both ends of the industry. We talked to Eli about his experience with crowdsourcing and the shifting workforce dynamics in food.

Inspired by the financial struggles of America's family farms, local Bostonian Jessica Angell created a business intelligence web application that provides producers with services such as price optimization, inventory management, and analytics. Cabbige, named for a slang term for money from old-fashioned gangster films, is a big step for small-scale agriculture, which often faces challenges integrating into mainstream markets. We talked to Jessica, also a core Branchfood member, about her experience founding her startup from scratch.

Grove is the aquaponics company everyone is talking about. Their first product, a sophisticated indoor farm powered by LED lights and fish waste, promises produce year-round, as fresh and as local as it gets. Users can monitor their crops with a mobile app, tracking two separate gardening beds in a true integration of food+tech. We talked to Grove cofounder Gabe Blanchet about his company's journey and the lessons he's learned along the way.