Submitted
2020 Elevate Prize

Open Food Network - Growing Globally

Team Leader
Lynne Davis
About You and Your Work
Your bio:

Originally a software developer, I retrained as a farmer after coming to see food as central to our relationships with our planet and each other. Building community around farming led me to found Dean Forest Food Hub - a community-led online farmers market, and Street Goat - a series of community goat milking and grazing initiatives. Seeing both the impact and challenges of these projects, I went on to complete an MSc in Agricultural Economics then work in campaigning and policy research with the Landworkers’ Alliance, La Via Campesina, Food, Farming and Countryside Commission and the Ecological Land Cooperative.

These diverse perspectives have convinced me that building community scale solutions must be our priority. This is the knowledge and focus with which I build the Open Food Network platform and community - to create visionary solutions that grow resilience, diversity, community and relationships in our food systems locally and globally.

Project name:
Open Food Network - Growing Globally
One-line project summary:
Putting people, planet, relationships and communities at the centre of global food systems.
Present your project.

The food systems we have in place don’t work for people or the planet. Local communities know their own land, health and cultural needs, but they lack the tools and support to meet those needs while feeding themselves. 

The Open Food Network is an open source, decentralised toolset enabling food networks to grow from the ground up. The platform enables short supply chains to thrive locally, making prices transparent, empowering small enterprises, creating employment and connecting markets. 

The Open Food Network is designed for use by communities around the world. When communities drive decisions, healthy, nutritious food becomes the norm and people build relationships that are based on trust and shared benefit. When people trust that their families are nourished and their communities are thriving, they are better placed to create cooperative, peaceful responses to any crisis. Healthy communities are fundamental to a safe, beautiful future for everyone.

Submit a video.
What specific problem are you solving?

Our food system is destroying the world's ecosystems. According to the UN, food production accounts for 37% of greenhouse gases. Agriculture accounts for 70% of land use globally and is a primary contributor to biodiversity loss and ocean acidification. 

Around the world 1 billion people are undernourished and 1 billion people are overweight. Both are the result of food systems that are not sufficiently nourishing. Diet related disease is by far the leading cause of death in the global north. In the global south poor diet creates complications across a range of diseases, notably reducing the efficacy of HIV treatment.

Power in our food system has been extracted from the hands of communities and placed in the hands of a small number of multinational corporations. From farm gate to urban plate, 93% of the financial value of the food is extracted. The more hands it passes through en route, the less power exists at either extremity of production or consumption. 

With food as the nexus of ecological, health, and economic crises it is imperative that we create sustainable, fair, viable access to healthy food that works for people and the planet. OFN builds this power within communities.

What is your project?

The Open Food Network team has created an open source online tool set that enables food networks to grow from the ground up. The platform enables short supply chains to thrive locally, making prices transparent, empowering small enterprises, creating employment, connecting markets, and supporting strong communities. 

The platform handles food system administration - payments, logistics, aggregation, inventory and integrations - in a transparent, distributed way that puts local producers and communities in informed control of their businesses. Most importantly this functionality is networked. Communities, producers and shoppers can build local food systems for their neighbourhoods, scale to resilient regional food systems and even connect globally enabling genuinely fair trade that connects communities around the world. In this way we enable community driven food systems that benefit from economies of scale without centralised control.

The global network also shares knowledge, practice and information in this way. COVID has demonstrated this value as community food systems have not only been able to reliably serve their communities through food system shocks, but OFN communities responded fast, learning from others internationally and sharing best practice ahead of our governments.

Who does your project serve, and in what ways is the project impacting their lives?

OFN empowers people and communities around the world in multivariate ways best explained through example. Tamar Valley Food Hubs (TVFH) are long-term members of OFN UK. Being embedded in their community and knowing their customers like neighbours, they responded fast to assist vulnerable folks during COVID. Local relationships enabled them to efficiently manage massive supply chain shifts when demand spiked and hospitality pivoted to retail overnight.

TVFH source most of their food from local producers who invest in regenerative agriculture (made possible because producers retain 80% of the retail price). TVFH’s imported olive oil is transported by the Sail Cargo Alliance, a network of sail ships that partner with OFN to create sustainable trade routes. TVFH also sell fair trade coffee, connecting directly with communities in East Africa that produce a wide range of crops for local consumption alongside this export cash crop. People create food systems that nourish them with both food and livelihoods. We help them link locally, regionally and globally.

As a platform cooperative our users are members; codesigning via our forum, Slack, meetings, calls, surveys and visits. The community works as we link local work on the ground (and sea) with global collaborations and needs.

Which dimension of The Elevate Prize does your project most closely address?
  • Elevating issues and their projects by building awareness and driving action to solve the most difficult problems of our world
Explain how your project relates to The Elevate Prize and your selected dimension.

The Open Food Network drives action to solve the world’s most difficult problem: how can the human race sustainably feed itself nourishing, healthy food while healing the existing damage to ecosystems and communities? This damage to people and planet that is a direct result of extractive, profit-driven, short sighted systems. The Open Food Network is far more than an amazing software toolset: it is a way of seeing the world that puts food systems back into the hands of the producers, communities and eaters - the people for whom food systems really matter.

How did you come up with your project?

This project has been a journey and the concept has grown at each stage. The idea began when I was farming in the Forest of Dean in 2012. When the farm lost its main buyer we struggled to find a new local market for a farm at our scale. Speaking with other farmers experiencing the same problems, I coordinated an online farmers market and shared distribution, an innovation that saved the farm. We soon linked with other groups across the country experimenting with similar models; we set to improving and jointly managing our software. We linked with a group in Australia doing similar work and pooled our resources. Soon a group in France got in touch and the international collaboration began to grow.  

We found that the fundamental challenges were the same in each new country that joined the collaboration. Our organising principle of subsidiarity - as local as possible - informed the structure of our work, so that we would all benefit from local distribution, regional coordination and global software collaboration. As importantly, we identified a common set of values and developed food systems expertise that continues to help us maximise our impact on people and communities globally.

Why are you passionate about your project?

Food is the perfect symbol for the nexus of humanity's beauty and its pain. From our first moments, it is how we connect with the outside world and bring it inside us - a deliberate act of consuming the earth that most of us do every day. Our stories and cultures are, at their essence, long traditions of relationship with the land and with each other, surrounded by food. Producing, preparing and sharing food is central to what it means to be human. The nature of these cultural relationships are how we build our identities and navigate our morality. 

Our shift away from the land and each other are perfectly seen through the lens of food. The prevailing global demand for a mobile workforce compels peoples to leave their ancestral lands and to eat faster food in more isolated ways, and humanity suffers. We are eroding our health, cultures, communities, and identities, and struggling in vain to find meaningful replacements, imprisoned by global market forces.

OFN changes this trajectory and puts communities back in the centre of our food systems: owned and driven by communities, achieving food sovereignty and a reconnection with what it means to be human.

Why are you well-positioned to deliver this project?

My first career in software engineering gave me hard-won expertise in software delivery. Having worked in software in the UK, China and Uganda I have insight into the kinds of cultural and environmental differences that arise in global software projects.

Five years as a farmer taught me the challenges of food production and processing. I understand what shoppers demand and the challenges involved in delivering consistently high quality products at low prices. I understand tools farmers need to support marketing and distribution.

Working in community food distribution has shown me the importance of reducing administrative overhead, but the most valuable contribution of any community food enterprise is the human connection it enables. OFN is far more than an online marketplace: it fosters and creates a space for community days, farm visits and rich producer-shopper relationships.

As an agroecological economist I have rigorously studied food systems and sustainability economics. This gives me the skills to develop technology for communities that enable them to navigate the incredibly competitive markets for food by intimately understanding the strengths of short supply chains and amplifying them through innovative tools.

My time working in international social movements gave me the networks and connections to leverage the platform in a socially just way. After being embedded in peasant and indigenous movements I can start and implement projects in ways that create community ownership. I understand the role of women and traditional knowledge in building resilient food systems and am able to use this knowledge responsibly.

Provide an example of your ability to overcome adversity.

While working as a farmer I was crushed by a boulder on a farm and broke my pelvis and back, 15 breaks in total. Going from full time farming to lying in a hospital bed was a huge shock. For months I did not know if I would be able to walk and move as I did again. 

Recovering from such an accident requires physical stamina and a lot of inner work. My journey had taken me from high tech researcher to low tech land-based work; but perhaps there was a middle path. How could I weave technology and sustainable farming together in a way that would enable local and global challenges to be solved side by side?

In the months I spent lying horizontal I worked on the internationalisation of the Open Food Network - the start of the journey that took a local software tool and made it something that could be applied across the world. 

I made a full recovery from this accident, but still live true to the metaphor it revealed. By keeping one hand in the soil nurturing the earth and one hand weaving connective technology, we can be united yet distributed, global yet local.

Describe a past experience that demonstrates your leadership ability.

During the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, global food systems transformed rapidly. Overnight, markets, retailers and the hospitality sector shifted online. Overnight, farmers and other producers had to find new markets and consumers had to find new food sources. In the 8 weeks that followed, OFN grew in turnover globally by over 900%. While the platform was experiencing this growth, the OFN community was also flooded with grief, fear and confusion.

In leading the organisation, I firstly ensured that everyone had a regular space to share their experiences and feelings, both the OFN team and our users, via collaborative tools and interactive webinars. We encouraged people to reach out and feel heard. 

These emotional connections were pivotal in our ability to respond. We built emotional ties between food enterprises across regions and globally so key workers on the ground delivering to vulnerable people felt supported and better equipped. We developed key tools and features to support the response, informed by key workers directly. Our global community shared information from people running food enterprises in the countries affected first. Our community shared advice and best practice faster than our governments, and our network of people took care of each other.

How long have you been working on your project?
8 years
Where are you headquartered?
London, UK
What type of organization is your project?
  • Nonprofit
If you selected Other, please explain here.

The Open Food Network is a global collective of non-profit organisations registered in countries around the world. Each regional instance of the project registers locally and agrees to our Community Pledge. I am part of the UK collective which is a Community Interest Company.

More About Your Work
Your Business Model & Funding
The Prize
Solution Team:
Lynne Davis
Lynne Davis