Kootenai entrepreneur builds AI food network for farmers and buyers
Joni Kindwall-Moore is building an AI matchmaking system that helps North Idaho producers find buyers and turn crops into revenue.
In Coeur d’Alene, Joni Kindwall-Moore is building a digital network meant to move food from fields, through processing, and into the hands of buyers. Her work sits at the intersection of agriculture, technology and health, with a clear aim for Kootenai County producers who need more than a good harvest to make money. The real bottleneck is often not growing the crop, but finding the right partner, the right market and the right path to sale.
From bedside care to food-system software
Kindwall-Moore’s route into food innovation began long before she founded Snacktivist Inc. and The Ryzosphere. She spent nearly two decades in nursing and health care research, including time at Kootenai Health, where she saw diet-related disease affecting large numbers of patients and saw no strong system for getting people better food at an affordable price. That experience pushed her toward the idea that food access and health outcomes are linked at the most practical level, not just the policy level.
She is a former intensive-care nurse with more than 15 years of nursing experience and more than 25 years across scientific inquiry, bedside healthcare and food-system activism. Kootenai Health Research Services is focused on improving health in the community and beyond.
Snacktivist started with product, then grew into infrastructure
Snacktivist was founded in 2015 in Coeur d’Alene, and its early identity was rooted in food products, including gluten-free, non-GMO baking mixes and frozen items. Over time, the company’s description broadened. It now describes itself as a food innovation company working on climate-smart crops, regenerative and data-connected supply chains, sustainable ingredient sourcing and value chain design.
It is working on the less visible parts of the food economy, the pieces that connect farmers, processors, brokers and buyers. Its work includes value-chain coordination, brokerage and regenerative food-systems thought leadership, placing the company in the middle of the movement to make local and regional food networks more usable for the people who grow and move product.
A farm can produce a good crop and still struggle if it cannot quickly identify a processor, a distributor or a buyer with the right specifications. Kindwall-Moore is trying to build the connective tissue that lets more of that value stay in the region.
The Ryzosphere is built to connect the people in the middle
The Ryzosphere connects producers, processors and buyers through AI-powered matchmaking, with the goal of accelerating regenerative, bioregional agriculture. Kindwall-Moore has said the need is obvious because, in her words, “there is no Craigslist for this industry.” The point is simple: agriculture is full of people who need one another, but they are not organized in one easy-to-search place.
The platform is meant to solve that gap by making discovery easier and reducing the friction that keeps good products from reaching market. In 2025, the company described The Ryzosphere as weeks away from beta launch and said it would use interactive mapping and enhanced profiles to help growers find new market channels. That approach is less about consumer branding than about transaction plumbing, helping the people on each end of the food chain see who can supply what, who can process it and who can buy it.
Kindwall-Moore says digitizing and connecting food can help everyone find partners, access new markets and see how the whole system works.
Why this matters in North Idaho
Regenerative agriculture is focused on improving the vitality of living systems while reducing outside inputs. For growers, that can mean a better long-term foundation for soil and production, but it still leaves open the harder question of how to reach a buyer who will pay for the product.
It is a response to a national-scale supply-chain problem from Coeur d’Alene, built around the unglamorous but essential middle ground between the field and the shelf. Farmers, ranchers, processors and purchasers all need visibility, market access and a way to communicate supply clearly. The Ryzosphere and Snacktivist are designed to make that conversation easier.
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