Figma Make | AI turns local farm idea into working marketplace
Figma has shared a new maker story about Aaron Veale, the founder behind Planet Food, a marketplace app built to help small farms sell produce directly to restaurants. Published on November 26, 2025, the story explains how Veale used Figma Make to move from a local farming problem to working prototypes, user testing, and backend-connected product flows in just a few weeks.
Figma Make shows how AI prototyping can move an idea into a real product
Figma’s story is not just about a farming marketplace. For web designers and template creators, it is a useful look at how AI-assisted prototyping can compress the early stages of product design: research, layout exploration, user flow testing, visual refinement, and basic functional validation.
Veale used Figma Make to build Planet Food after learning about the pressure facing small growers in British Columbia. The goal was to create a marketplace that helps farmers list their produce and gives restaurants a way to discover and order local ingredients more directly.
How Figma Make shaped the product workflow
According to Figma, Veale first used Figma Make to create early versions of two connected systems: one for farmers to record and organize produce, and another for chefs to search and order ingredients. Running multiple Make projects in parallel allowed him to iterate quickly while testing concepts with potential users.
The first prototypes became conversation starters. Veale could show farmers and restaurants multi-screen systems, collect feedback, and adjust the product direction around real workflow needs, including reducing clicks, improving visibility in outdoor conditions, and making administrative tasks feel faster for users with limited time.
New lessons for AI-assisted interface design
The most interesting design lesson is that prompting became part of the UX process. Veale used customer personas, workflow details, screenshots of familiar interaction patterns, and narrative prompts to make the interface feel more human, more specific, and better aligned with farmers and restaurant teams.
For web designers, this is a strong reminder that AI prototyping still depends on good design direction. The quality of the result improves when the prompt includes user context, pain points, visual expectations, task constraints, and the real conditions where the product will be used.
That makes Figma Make useful as a fast exploration layer, but not as a replacement for product thinking. The designer still has to guide structure, simplify flows, check hierarchy, and decide whether the interface actually solves the right problem.
From prototype to functional marketplace
A major step came when Veale connected the product to Supabase, allowing real backend data to support the marketplace workflow. Figma says this helped the farmer and restaurant systems communicate with each other, making the prototype more useful for real validation.
For template creators and web builders, the takeaway is clear: the design-to-product gap is getting smaller. Tools like Figma Make can help creators move from interface concepts to working product flows faster, but the strongest results still come from combining AI generation with research, testing, backend structure, and careful UX review.
Sources and Recommended Links
- Version control: One founder’s mission to save local farms with Figma Make | Figma Blog (Official)
- Figma Make | Figma (Official)
- Planet Food | Planet Food
