From Barn Meeting to Built App: How Figma Make Powered a Farm-to-Table Marketplace
British Columbia’s small farms are in crisis. The Canadian government estimates that last year, BC farmers experienced a record net loss of $457 million CAD, with the sector operating at a net loss since 2017. When entrepreneur Aaron Veale attended a town hall in Surrey, BC, and heard local growers describe the compounding pressures of rising costs, supply chain disruptions, and shifting regulations, he didn’t just sympathize. He decided to act. “Driving home, I said to my girlfriend, ‘I don’t think anyone’s going to help them. I think this is what I should be doing with my life.’”
Veale spent the next six weeks interviewing farmers to find where he could make a difference. His conclusion: farmers excel at growing food, but struggle to market it, leaving them vulnerable to large distributors who often force them to sell at a loss. Veale’s answer was Planet Food, a marketplace designed to connect local growers with Vancouver restaurants seeking high-quality ingredients. To move fast, he turned to Figma’s prompt-to-app tool, Figma Make, and brought the vision to life in less than three weeks.
A Prompt-First Prototype
Planet Food required two separate interfaces: a Farm OS for growers to log and categorize harvests, and a Restaurant OS for chefs to search and order ingredients. In the early phase, Veale ran two Figma Makes in parallel, layering improvements into one system while the other generated new iterations. Roughly 20 prompts over the course of a day produced the first multi-screen prototype.
He used those early builds as a conversation starter with potential users. “I could build multi-screen systems in 10–20 prompts, show them to a farmer the next morning, or drop by a restaurant before opening,” he says. Those conversations shaped the product: the app defaults to dark mode to reduce glare in the field, and every task is designed to take under three clicks, since farmers often work 12–16 hour days with significant time dedicated to admin work. “I reduced the noise and the clicks, and it was a much cleaner experience and more tailored to user workflows.”
Over time, Veale refined his process, capturing screenshots of familiar mobile micro-interactions like swipes and slide-ups, then feeding them into a master prompt so Figma Make could stitch the elements together into a polished UI.
Design With a Director’s Eye
A designer by trade, Veale has long been frustrated by the gap between his ideas and the code required to build them. “In the past, I had to lean on 10 people to create my vision, and I always had to compromise,” he says. “This is the first time I don’t have to compromise.”
Drawing on his background in film directing, Veale treated prompting as storytelling. He distilled his research into detailed customer personas for both farmers and chefs, outlining traits, needs, and pain points, then passed those personas into ChatGPT along with the MVP onboarding flow to generate fresh prompts for Figma Make. He also wrote customer narratives about the “aha” moment each user group would experience with Planet Food and pasted those stories with photos of real customers back into Figma Make. The result: the onboarding UX evolved from a simple email signup into a more personalized, colorful experience.
Making the Backends Talk
The pivotal breakthrough arrived when Figma introduced a Supabase integration for Figma Make, enabling Veale to connect real backend data to his prototypes. Previously, he had been working with mock data based on inventory lists he observed at restaurants. With Supabase, farmers could upload and store actual produce inventory that chefs could purchase from in the app. “For the first time, the Restaurant OS and the Farmer OS were talking to each other,” Veale says.
The integration also unlocked third-party partners like Resend, which sends email notifications triggered by app interactions. Every transaction now generates an automatic email to both grower and buyer — and to Veale himself, who handled early deliveries personally. As he puts it, “I delivered half a pig once — which is wild.”
What’s Next for Planet Food
With 1,200 farms registered to use Planet Food, Veale is focused on expanding responsiveness: a speech-to-text feature for farmworkers to add inventory by voice, and a Restaurant OS feature that lets chefs upload a photo of an ingredient list to generate an order. He plans to hire a lean team while maintaining an AI-first approach to development.
His most ambitious goal is Eat Local BC Day, a two-day food celebration planned for September 2026 at BC Place Stadium in Vancouver, aimed at raising awareness of local food and direct farm purchases. “Figma Make allows founders like me to build the things we’ve always dreamed of building,” Veale says. “Thinking big is not the limitation anymore.”
