A spontaneous road trip brought Cureate founder and CEO Kim Bryden to Arkansas in 2020, and the startup scene she encountered was enough to persuade her to establish a second headquarters for Cureate in Arkansas and move her home here.
Founded in 2014 in Washington, D.C., Cureate aims to shift dollars into local communities through farm, food and beverage education and procurement. In 2021, the company expanded to northwest Arkansas, establishing its second hub.
Cureate’s proprietary platform, Cureate Connect, is a custom-built system that serves as a digital marketplace, creating connections between local vendors and institutional buyers.
The company started as a business training program, and Bryden came up with the idea for Cureate Connect after seeing businesses that participated in the program struggle to find a balance between large and small markets.
So Cureate specifically targets mid-tier food service accounts at places like hospitals and medical systems, universities, convention centers, arenas, corporate cafeterias and hotels. Through Cureate’s system, those buyers can search for and order products through local vendor and product databases.
The platform handles the entire procurement process, from order placement to delivery confirmation and invoicing, acting as a centralized supplier of local goods. And for small vendors, Cureate offers an easy entry point into larger markets. Vendors can include makers of consumer packaged goods, beverage producers, farmers, bakers, caterers and restaurateurs.
Bryden said that Cureate is different from other spaces in the food and beverage industry because it is completely free for the vendors, and Cureate doesn’t take a percentage of profits. Instead, Cureate generates revenue by charging buyers transaction fees.
“If you’re a vendor and you invoice us $30 for a case of cookies, you get paid $30,” Bryden said. She hopes that the free entry point encourages small businesses to participate in the mid-sized marketplace.
“There’s a rural-urban divide of access to opportunity,” Bryden said. “That is where I personally feel so invested in what we do with Cureate. It’s a confluence of both economic development but also building community and belonging. I hope that we’re creating these pathways and channels whether or not somebody even gets a sale.”
Since launching the procurement network in 2019, Bryden said Cureate has shifted more than $2 million from large institutions to small local businesses.
The company operates with a team of five employees and six contractors, all working remotely. And Bryden said Cureate reports annual revenue of approximately $2 million. The company, which celebrated its 10th anniversary this year, plans to continue using technology to connect local businesses with larger institutional buyers.
The Connect platform is scalable, and buyers enjoy having an “agile and innovative purchasing process,” Bryden said.
“Now we have technology that’s creating these efficiencies in this process that is extremely decentralized,” Bryden said. “That awareness of what is in the marketplace is that first question that we are answering.”
Bryden hopes that Cureate will continue to boost small businesses, because in her experience, buyers do want to support locals when the products are reliable and high quality.
“We have an opportunity to change business as usual, while also uplifting small local business,” Bryden said. “We’re here to try and make that as seamless and smooth as possible for all stakeholders involved, so that we can live in a more interconnected and economically vibrant community.”
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