How an Unconventional Food Company Uses Jotform to Give Back

Oakland-based Back to the Roots is on a mission to redo food as we know it, offering a line of ready-to-grow and ready-to-eat products found in grocery stores around the country.

The company was founded in 2009 when UC Berkeley classmates, Nikhil Arora and Alejandro (Alex) Velez, learned from a professor that you could grow gourmet mushrooms using only used coffee grounds. Inspired, the duo set out to offer products that customers could grow themselves with minimal effort — including a grow-it-yourself mushroom farm and a self-cleaning fish tank that grows herbs and sprouts on top.

What the company soon discovered was that people loved sharing photos of the food they grew, especially children. Riding on the trend, they wondered if there was a way to tap into that excitement about growing food at home and turn it into something more. And thus, their Grow One, Give One campaign was born. Customers participated in the community campaign by uploading pictures of their Back to the Roots kits fully grown. For each picture uploaded, the company donated another kit to a classroom of the customer’s choice.

A Tool to Help Give Back

So what did Back to the Roots use to promote and carry out their Grow One, Give One campaign? If you guessed Jotform, you’re correct! By taking advantage of Jotform’s capabilities, Back to the Roots successfully built a form where users could easily upload photos to the website. In turn, Back to the Roots could see every submission as they came in and quickly sort the responses.

Using Jotform, the company created an aesthetically pleasing upload form that matches the look and feel of the rest of their website. The form asks for the customer’s contact information, as well as the classroom they’d like to nominate to receive a new kit. Additionally, there’s an option to upload a photo of a sprouting kit.

The Grow One, Get One program has been a huge success. So far, the company’s been able to donate more than 1,300 products to various schools because of customer submissions through a single form.

As Back to the Roots has grown, it has ventured into ready-to-eat products, such as snacks and cereals. Recently, they scored a huge win by securing a contract to have their cereals served in New York City public schools, as featured in a New York Times article. But even with their growth, they continue to need an easy, effective way to manage forms that doesn’t take developer time and resources that they simply don’t have. And Jotform is happy to be a part of the journey.

Do you have an upload form or a Back to the Roots story to share with us? Let us know in the comments below!