Heather Hilleren, founder of Local Dirt
While working at Whole Foods in the early 2000s, Heather Hilleren, 41, noticed a problem. “Buyers played phone tag all day long with farmers on the go,” she says, which made it challenging to include more local growers and maximize produce variety. So Hilleren joined the burgeoning locavore movement with Local Dirt, an online market-place thatconnects thousands of farmers with nearby buyers in every state. Its mission: to cut costs and make it easier for everyone to buy local food.