Meet Foodzie, The Etsy-Like Site for Artisanal Foods.

With all the brouhaha here this week about TechCrunch50 spouting startups in San Francisco, and the just-concluded DemoFall, held in San Diego, it’s easy to think that all the cool entrepreneurial stuff is only happening in California.

That’s why I was so happy to hear about Foodzie, one of the intriguing new site concepts emerging from TechStars, an incubator program in Boulder, Colorado. TechStars was founded by a collective of Colorado-based entrepreneurs as a way of promoting entrepreneurial activity in their home state.

Guru favorite Springwise reports:
Consumers interested in handmade goods already have online marketplace Etsy to help them find new treasures, and now Foodzie aims to bring similar capabilities to the foodies of the world.

Based in Boulder, Colo., Foodzie is an online marketplace dedicated to helping consumers discover and buy food from small artisan producers and growers. The site acts as an aggregator that focuses on gourmet and organic health foods, allowing small producers to set up storefronts to display and sell their products. Though Foodzie hasn’t yet officially launched its full marketplace, three producers are up and running in a “sneak preview” version of the site: Seth Ellis Chocolatier, Boulder Popcorn and Tetulia Teas, all out of Colorado.

Nicely designed producer pages feature not just a selection of products for sale online, but also information on ingredients and allergens, tags, photos and background details on the people behind the store.

Foodzie operates on a commission-based model whereby producers pay the company a fee of 20 percent for each transaction conducted through the site, allowing the producers to keep a full 80 percent of what they charge. (Traditional retailers, by contrast, often charge fees as high as 50 percent.)

Foodzie is currently seeking USD 350,000 in seed funding. C’mon readers, step up to the plate (pun intended) and give these folks some moolah.