Justin Intal and the checkout that changed the question

A grocery delivery usually includes bags. At The Hub on the Hill in Essex, New York, it also included a card terminal. In 2020, workers brought the machine to customers’ homes so they could swipe an EBT card in person. The food could travel. The checkout had to come along for the ride.

Justin Intal encountered that arrangement while working on Forage. There is something almost comic about a payment machine making house calls, until you consider the work required to keep doing it. Someone had found a practical way around a missing online payment option. The workaround also made the missing option impossible to ignore.

For Intal, the encounter helped redirect a company. Forage had begun as an application for finding better grocery prices. It became a business helping merchants accept government benefits online. The question changed from where shoppers could save money to whether they could complete the purchase at all. A cheaper basket has limited charm when the checkout refuses your card.

The shopping list came first

The earlier Forage Grocery app dated to 2019. Intal was living in Oakland and receiving EBT benefits himself. He also started a Facebook group where more than 10,000 parents exchanged recipes and shopping advice. Among the problems they raised was the difficulty of buying groceries online with those benefits.

A shopping list is a useful place to begin thinking about a business. It contains actual purchases rather than imagined customers. People want particular things, have particular budgets and need a workable way to get home with dinner. Product language can become grand very quickly. A list of groceries keeps it on a short leash.

Intal’s own experience gave this project a personal connection. His customers’ conversations gave it additional perspectives. Those are different kinds of knowledge, and a business needs room for both. Using a service yourself can reveal an inconvenience immediately. Listening to other people can reveal how many versions of that inconvenience exist.

The first idea addressed price. Comparing retailers might help someone stretch a budget. But it depended on a step further down the shopping journey: the ability to pay. Intal later described the shift as helping more grocers accept SNAP online. The new work moved closer to the obstacle that could stop the entire transaction.

There is a certain discipline in letting a customer’s problem make an existing product less important. Once you have named an app, described it and persuaded people to care about it, abandoning its original function can feel like walking away from the work. In Forage’s case, the change preserved the purpose while replacing the mechanism. The groceries remained the point.

A small grocer, a larger problem

The Hub on the Hill introduced Forage to the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service. By December 2020, the payments idea was gathering momentum. The consumer app was shelved. Forage joined Y Combinator’s summer 2021 batch, following its appearance in Envision’s summer 2020 cohort.

The small grocer matters to this story because it makes the problem visible at human scale. A national market can sound abstract. A worker arriving with both groceries and a card reader is easier to understand. The customer is ready to buy. The merchant is ready to sell. Between those two intentions sits a technical requirement.

In October 2021, Intal and fellow founder Victor Fimbres appeared in a webinar alongside AdkAction’s Brittany Christenson about expanding online SNAP purchasing in New York. AdkAction had helped the Hub apply to become an online SNAP vendor. The discussion connected the payment work to smaller businesses and rural customers, rather than treating online grocery as a service belonging only to large chains.

That is an unusually useful setting for an early company’s story. It gives the software a job you can describe without opening a pitch deck. A local vendor wants to serve its customers through another channel. The payment system needs to accommodate that relationship. The business opportunity grows out of making an existing exchange easier to finish.

It also changes what counts as progress. A beautifully arranged digital storefront is only part of the experience. An order has to survive the checkout, and the merchant has to be permitted to accept the payment. The visible page and the less visible process must work together. Otherwise, convenience remains a promise printed above an unusable button.

The part of the internet with paperwork

Intal’s 2022 explanation of the merchant journey included a 133-page government guide. Forage paired software with EBT expertise to help retailers work through requirements covering eligible inventory, refunds and payments split between benefits and another method. The company’s task included helping a merchant prepare its business requirements document.

These details have little natural glamour. An inventory classification is unlikely to win applause at a dinner party. Yet it determines whether the purchase works. If a basket contains items covered by benefits and items requiring another payment, the checkout must respect the distinction without asking the shopper to untangle the system behind it.

Forage’s business made that administrative work part of the product. A merchant needed more than a connection to a payment network. It needed a way through the approval process and a checkout that followed the rules. Intal explained the work in three parts: operations, compliance and technology. The sequence is useful precisely because software cannot solve every preceding step by itself.

“They’re there to sell food.”

Justin Intal, on grocers being expected to become technologists, 2022

The remark gives his argument its plainest form. A retailer’s expertise lies in running a store. Requiring that retailer to assemble a separate payments and regulatory operation adds another occupation to the working day. A specialist can earn its place by making that extra occupation unnecessary, or at least less burdensome.

For a founder, this is a different kind of product ambition. You are building something other people should rarely need to think about. Success leaves the shopper concentrating on the basket and the merchant concentrating on the order. The underlying work is substantial, but it becomes most useful when it stops demanding attention.

Leaving the failed ideas on the record

Intal’s public conversation on the Found podcast in May 2022 included a separate subject: being candid about failure. He discussed vulnerability and transparency as a CEO, and the episode described him as leaving failed companies and ideas visible on LinkedIn. The unsuccessful attempts belonged in the account of his career.

That approach makes a useful companion to the Forage pivot. An abandoned product can be treated as an embarrassing detour, or as part of how a founder learned to ask a better question. The second account has more room for the customer. It allows the original idea to have been reasonable, incomplete and worth changing.

A polished career history often removes precisely the details that would help another person understand the decisions. The reader gets the finished answer with the workings erased. Keeping earlier attempts visible restores some of the uncertainty. It reminds an aspiring founder that a company’s eventual description may differ considerably from the first one.

Intal also spoke positively about being challenged by other entrepreneurs. In USC’s Brittingham Social Enterprise Lab impact report, he said of the Social Venture Coaching Competition: The entrepreneurs and partners around you challenge you to be better. The praise was for the pressure of the surrounding community, as well as the connections it offered.

Placed together, these public comments suggest a practical reading of entrepreneurial experience: ideas need examination, and a founder benefits from people willing to examine them. That is an interpretation of his remarks, rather than a claim that every difficult decision comes easily. Changing course still means doing the work of changing course.

A founding chapter has an ending

Intal left Forage in spring 2022. Ofek Lavian became CEO, while Fimbres remained chief technology officer. By August, the company had announced a $22 million Series A. Those events belong to the continuing company story; Intal’s role in this profile is co-founder and founding CEO.

The distinction matters when telling a founder’s story. The person who helps establish a business and the person running it years later may be different people. Each role carries its own work. Keeping the dates clear gives the founding contribution a shape, rather than stretching a title indefinitely across everything the company subsequently does.

His later public activity still touched the intersection of government and technology. In November 2024, Intal described discussing possibilities for government-facing innovation with a group of Y Combinator founders. In October 2025, Flex Capital included him among its new venture partners helping with sourcing and diligence.

The latter role puts a founder’s experience in a different setting. Evaluating an early company means asking what its initial description leaves unresolved. Is the customer’s difficulty the one being addressed? What has to happen before the product can be useful? Forage’s early history provides a concrete example of why those questions deserve attention.

Return to the card terminal at the doorstep. It is a modest object to place at the center of a founder profile, but an instructive one. It showed where a digital service still depended on an in-person transaction. Intal helped turn that observation into a different business. The company changed direction so the shopper could keep going.