Kathleen Barsotti and Martin Barnes were pioneers of the Organic Foods Movement in the 1970s—a movement dismissed at the time by wholesalers, distributors, and retailers as unrealistic. Today, it’s an essential part of our food system.

Their third son, Thaddeus Barsotti, grew up on their organic truck farm in the 1980s, raising “ugly but healthy” produce and selling it directly to customers at farmers’ markets. Over the decades, he worked in every corner of the food system—growing, harvesting, cooling, shipping, selling wholesale, and running both brick-and-mortar and online retail—gaining a rare, first-hand understanding of what the current system can deliver, and what it cannot.
Yolo Fill Co. is the next step in that journey: a marketplace that reshapes how information and money move through the food system, giving producers and customers the practical tools to work together to raise the highest-quality food using the best practices. The core shift is simple but powerful: instead of the system telling producers what to grow based on what it thinks customers will buy, customers tell producers what they want and how they want it grown. This change puts values—quality, transparency, and sustainability—at the center, letting customers pull them all the way through the food system.