Open Food Network - Growing Globally

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

As the Open Food Network team works to build software to support equitable, resilient, community-based food systems, it aims to be a living example of an alternative way of organising and working. We are constantly experimenting with new structures and forms of collaboration, and have been refining our current model ever since we set up the Open Food Foundation in 2012. OFN is a distributed collaborative organisation run by committed people all over the world. It blends aspects of sociocracy and holacracy with governance elements we have developed over time in response to specific challenges and tensions in those models. Everyone who is interested in contributing to the shaping of a decision can do so, while agile and open-source software development concepts like lazy consensus are incorporated to make sure things get done.

While OFN has developed its particular way of working for its own mission and context, the model can be adopted and adapted for all sorts of organisations. Groups interested in democratic, horizontal, collaborative ways of working might be particularly interested in exploring this approach. By emphasising deliberation, contributors are engaged and empowered to shape decisions and actions.  

To effectively coordinate instances across the world, OFN has developed a way of working that integrates instant messaging, video conferencing, forums, and collaborative document production. Despite our reliance on these virtual tools, Open Food Network cultivates connection among collaborators and with the earth through an intentionally developed culture of mindfulness and appreciation of one another as whole people.

The OFN Theory of Change explains in detail how we will accomplish our mission, and I’ll summarize it here. We assume that the actions we take will foster human connection, care of the earth, and a peaceful, abundant world.

Our inputs include a strong software delivery team passionate about solving complex food system problems and committed food system experts in all the regions around the world who have both an intimate knowledge of the sector and the networks and relationships to act.

We describe our outputs as being of three types: a software platform, a learning community, and a resource base. Our low cost, easy to use platform removes the barriers to running a community scale food enterprise and enables a transformative, community-based food system vision. We facilitate learning and collaboration opportunities at local, regional and international levels, building resilient networks and communities and guiding our software development process. Guided by common challenges we see in our learning community we build resources like webinars, marketing guides, blogs, videos, and ways to engage individual helpers to aid in the process of building a thriving network of local food enterprises. 

The immediate outcomes we achieve is the creation of a distributed, global, vibrant network of community food enterprises that: use efficient software that serves their needs; run effective community businesses; build collaborations to realise shared social and ecological objectives; and build resilience through direct engagement, lived experience, and real human needs.

Our project’s long term outcomes include a diverse food system, sustainable production, and healthy communities. When community food enterprises thrive,the food economy is more diverse, vibrant and inclusive, celebrating both provenance and culture. Improved markets for ecologically produced food encourage more producers to adopt ecologically sustainable practices while shorter supply chains result in less waste. Community food enterprises enable communities to eat healthier food, improving access, awareness, and social interdependence.

OFN serves people and communities via a ripple effect where instances serve producers and hubs, and these in turn serve other producers and consumers.  One hub may sell products from 25 different producers, and have hundreds of customers in a week. The consumers are served, and actors all up and down the food chain are also participating in and served by OFN’s infrastructure. Jobs are created in aggregation, distribution, sales, and other functions as networks expand. Sales and participation in OFN’s shops can vary based on season, geography and of course influences like that of COVID-19. 

We estimate that the 15 instances active today will serve a total of over 9000 producers and over 450 hubs, which serve over 80,000 regular shopper households this year. A year from now, we are looking at 22-26 instances, and some of them will be smaller because they will be in countries with smaller markets, but the larger instances will continue to grow. Our goal is that in a year, based on what we know about how instances grow, we will serve over 200,000 individuals who, because of OFN, will be able to easily access food produced by local producers. In five years, with 35-40 instances in place globally, we estimate we may reach over one million people all over the world, each of them directly participating in community based food enterprises enabled by OFN.

The Open Food Network changes lives by providing an infrastructure for communities to support those who produce their food, watch over their land, and keep their food systems vibrant and resilient. We tell the stories of resilient communities and create ways for people to learn from each other, no matter how far apart they may be geographically. Our goals for the next five years are focused on scaling our ability to support people and communities, creating stronger and stronger networks within communities and across the world.

Goals: 1 year

• Be operational in 27 countries globally

• Maintain growth from COVID

• Work with 20,000 ecologically and socially driven food producers and enterprises globally

• Reach, support and impact over 200,000 lives

• Significant software and infrastructure delivery in preparation for scale.

Goals: 5 years

• Be operational in 60 countries globally

• 20% annual growth across instances

• Work with 50,000 ecologically and socially driven food producers and enterprises globally

• Establish a model of socially and ecologically responsible trade links between countries

• Reaching over a million people with stories of resilience and transformation

• Partnerships with international institutions liberating resources for partners on the ground around the world, particularly in global south countries

Over the following one to five years our main barriers will be around capacity, developing sustainable revenue models, maturing from a legal perspective and our understanding of international law and tax.

Barriers - 1 year:

• Capacity -  expanding the team to build communities and develop the platform

• Legal development - Understanding and refining legal agreements in the countries we operate

• Intellectual Property - Protecting our IP while maintaining our transparency as we scale

• Global legal and tax knowledge - supporting new members of the international communities to gain the knowledge they need to operate legally. 

Barriers - 5 years:

• Partnerships - establishing relationships that foster this scale of growth. We will require legal support to develop our strategy before we are ready to enter this scale of contractual agreement

• Logistical barriers - In many of the countries that we expect to be establishing relationships logistics is a key market barrier. We expect the collaborations and communities we foster will innovate on logistics, but this will be a barrier that will slow progress while we find the innovative pathways.

• Capacity - we need to expand the team significantly

• Cultural - our team culture is strong and we will spend time maintaining this. This will present continued challenges as the languages and cultures within the team become more diverse.

My primary aim is in developing an organisation culture that focuses on transparency and dissemination of learning and knowledge, so that at every step we are supporting others to gain the knowledge they need. We have regular processes of review so that we can learn from our experiences and mistakes. We regularly engage in consequence scanning to help ensure that we keep our eyes not only on the intended but the unknown and unintended.

Overcoming barriers 1 year:

• Capacity: We are currently putting huge focus into raising funds and expanding our team. 

• Legal: We aim to build partnerships and bring in advisers. We aim to recruit pro-bono legal advice.

• Global legal and tax knowledge: We are developing resources that help instances to recruit the right advisers as they start. 

Overcoming barriers 5 years:

• Partnerships: We will invest in communications and continue to seek the support that can help us to build relationships and mentoring to help us navigate the complexities of these institutional relationships.

• Logistical barriers: We know that collaborations and shared learning are prime melding pots for innovation in problems such as logistics. We will continue to prioritise international exchange and develop specific organisational roles to support this work.

• Capacity: Our funding strategy is based on team expansion. We review our five year strategy annually.

• Cultural: Our community is full of trained facilitators and we recognise the emotional and spiritual aspects of international communities. Our involvement in other international communities have also given us the tools to navigate this.

As a global network of people and networks, OFN seeks out and benefits from partnerships of all kinds. 

Our partnerships are based on mutual support and amplification of our shared visions. We seek to give more power to those working at the grassroots and are included in many small-scale efforts for local and regional food justice. To name a few examples, in the UK we partner with farming organisations and social enterprise networks like the Landworkers Alliance and Cooperatives UK to support producers, share learning and connect opportunities. In the USA we partner with community aid and support organizations like Farm2People, Plowshares and Pikes Peak Solidarity Economy Learning Collective. 

We work closely with global movements for food sovereignty. In each area in which we work the organisation is led by grassroots organisations on the ground. Our ethos and focus on collaborative solutions to nearly universal problems attracts hundreds of like-minded organisations to the OFN community.

Some partnerships result in financial and organisational support: Mozilla Foundation is funding the streamlining of our processes for deploying OFN in new instances, and OFN South Africa is a semi-finalist in the Rockefeller Food Vision Prize process with an application which introduces an alternative currency using a Sustainable Food Fund.

In alignment with the Open Food Network as a whole, our business model structure follows the principle of subsidiarity - defined at the most local possible level.

At the most local level our learning community shares practices for creating local business models for community food enterprises. We commonly find that community food enterprises are set up with margins that are too low for viability, and encourage them to create plans that ensure long organisational life. Our community also encourages innovation in fiscal sustainability, respecting that while everyone deserves high quality food, not everyone has the same ability to pay. In this way community food enterprises can create resilient, viable and socially just businesses. A portion of their user fees goes to regional coordination.

At a regional/national level OFN Instances support their communities through facilitation and resource sharing. Instances ensure the food enterprises are fully supported to thrive, helping to solve software support issues and building reputation and markets. Each Instance creates their own revenue model based on the needs and expectations of their communities, usually aiming for 1-2% of turnover through the platform. Most instances also receive funds from consultancy and philanthropic sources. Instances contribute funding toward the global project.

The global project delivers the OFN software platform. This work is coordinated by a committed team to deliver software and maintain infrastructure for the global community. The global team is funded through a combination of instance contributions, philanthropic sources and paid consultancy and feature delivery services.

Currently over 90% of the budget for the global project comes from philanthropic sources. Our goal is to reduce this to 50% by 2025 and 30% by 2030. To do this, we will extend our cooperative/market linkage business model to allow for more participation by system beneficiaries.  

User fees are now collected by each operating instance and the impact of COVID-19 created a 900% increase in global platform turnover. This has increased our user fees significantly, though they still constitute less than 10% of global revenue. 

In 2021 we will explore revenue generation through crowdfunding feature development by users. Funding the platform through feature development will require a strong product vision and roadmap, along with sophisticated user surveying processes. The global community is wary of the power imbalances this revenue model could perpetuate, and will invest in product vision as a set of guiding principles for such investment.

As our global reach grows and our interoperability increases, we envisage opportunities to connect global north and global south markets using the platform. The platform will interoperate with alternative monetary systems such as Mobile Money and global trade networks enabling streamlined and distributed trade to be possible between wealthy economies of the global north and agricultural economies of the global south. Thus we anticipate that we will be able to draw revenue from consultation with international institutions and international governments in implementing revolutionary solutions that support smallholder farmers to access markets. This is a key objective for our mid-term revenue generation.

The OFN revenue model is meant to combine funds collected from enterprise-level users who typically contribute 1%-2% of their revenues to their national instances, with funding from other like-minded organisations. A proportion of the user contributions to national instances make their way to the common global fund. Funds in the form of grants and awards currently make up the bulk of contributions to the common global fund, which pays for product development and other shared work and infrastructure.  

Four individual OFN instances currently contribute to the common global fund.  In the past year, the Open Food Network has expanded to 8 new countries, and 5 existing national instances are new enough that they do not yet have the stable funding streams to contribute to the global fund, but it is anticipated that they will in the near future. If all instances were contributing, revenues from users would be in the US$60,000-US$120,000 range in 2020. Most instances have not yet reached that level of contribution, and OFN is more dependent than we would like to be on external funding. As instances mature, we will capture best practices for new instances, allowing us to increase user funding both as an amount and as a percentage of the global revenue stream, which should increase sustainability. OFN is, nonetheless, pleased and grateful for the many contributions over the years that have helped OFN achieve what it has so far, as shown in the table below.

In order to achieve the revenue generation model outlined above, the platform team will continue to need to raise funding through to 2030. Historically we have relied purely on grant funding and user contributions. The team does not have a lot of awareness or skill in other types of investment funding or development and would welcome advice and mentoring. In particular, we would value input on raising funds in a way that aligns with our values of not perpetuating existing wealth/power structures. 

We are beyond prototype and looking to scale our impact. We have demonstrated that we are capable of delivering solutions quickly and professionally, and can effectively make money go a very long way.  We are seeking USD$3m or more in funding assistance and partnership over the next three years for a step-change in our global operation.  This will provide four years of focused product development on the Open Food Network platform and technical ecosystem, allowing us to grow and support our team. This growth and strengthening of OFN includes creating full-time paid positions for designers, developers, a product manager, consultancy, and support staff; addressing ‘technical debt’ accrued through years of boot-strapping; implementing our redesign of the customer and enterprise experiences; and undertaking major architectural upgrades to better support transparent and flexible food supply networks, based on what we have learned so far.

Our current estimated expenses for 2020 are $297,000, of which 96% is spent directly on wages. These wages are split across product development (14%, or $43,000), user experience design (16%, or $48,000), software development (58%, or $173,000), quality assurance (5%, or $15,147), and new instance support (2%, or $6,000). We anticipate spending $5000 on tools and hosting costs, and $5000 on co-working. 

Each of these line items conceals an immense amount of volunteer labour. For example, supporting new instances can take around 100 hours some weeks - we have budget for closer to 3 hours. 

Our expenses are entirely dependent on the funding available, and we would hope to increase our spending across all wage areas, and to decrease the amount of unpaid labour being contributed. We know that our ability to fairly compensate contributors will directly impact our organisation’s strength and diversity, since relying on team members who must volunteer because funds aren’t available excludes those who would want to participate but don’t have the financial freedom or privilege to do so. Within our organisation, we recognise that a larger proportion of unpaid work is done by women, and the makeup of our team does not reflect the demographic or socioeconomic profiles of the communities for whom OFN is built. Our inability to pay fair wages to contributors reduces the number and diversity of the voices heard on our team, and we are motivated to remedy that.

The Open Food Network is at a critical stage of its global growth. Over the last 3 months as markets and food systems rapidly transformed, the aggregate value of transactions that have gone through global OFN instances has risen nine-fold, with some instances seeing even higher rates of growth. We have received US$350,000 COVID support funding to support local projects as well as global growth. We are poised to realise the potential for which we have been preparing for eight years.

Now, it is crucial that we get it right in terms of:

• recruiting the right people and Integrating them into a very special organisational culture; 

• addressing the issues of rapid organisational growth;

• assimilating new instance teams from ten new countries in the process of deploying the platform and joining the global processes;

• creating a global governance system to replace the virtual system that has to date been cobbled together by contributions from each of the national instances; and 

• ensuring that our license and legal processes are suitable for our current and future phases of growth.

I see the Elevate Prize as a prime opportunity to access the skills and networks that can support our project to grow toward its full potential. As part of the Prize cohort, we would be able to access international collaborations and networks that will respond to our vision and support us in the necessary mentoring, links and introductions to do so. This would be incredibly powerful in making our vision a reality.

To date our revenue model has been built on philanthropic and grant funding. Though this has enabled us to grow to this point, we need to find other forms of revenue generation in order to continue to scale. Partnerships in funding and revenue have the potential to be transformative. We need strong advice and mentoring to enable us to move in this direction, and we have a lot to offer potential partners - consulting skills, food systems expertise, our platform, and our collaborative way of working.

Accompanying this growth will be the increased importance of legal and regulatory policies and practices. The potential for these matters to restrict our growth are already present, as we expand into new regions without the capacity for regulatory preparation. Additionally, licensing and trademarking are legal areas in which a lack of knowledge and experience may result in us missing partnership opportunities.

OFN uses technology to support community food systems, and we are looking to partner with both technology organisations and food systems organisations. 

The relationship we have developed with Mozilla as a result of their award of COVID-19 related funding has resulted in doors opening for us that would not have been possible otherwise. We would like to develop more partnerships with individuals and organisations that understand the vision and ethos of OFN and are willing to use their influence and their networks to make introductions and recommendations that will support open source technology and facilitate the step change that OFN is ready to take.

In order to increase our impact we want to partner with international institutions seeking to deliver technical solutions that help boost global food sovereignty. International organisations such as La Via Campesina, Oxfam, A Growing Culture, EAT foundation, and the Ellen Macarthur Foundation are working to implement solutions aligned with the UN’s Strategic Development Goals in partnership with grassroots organisations, unions and civil society to build resilient food system solutions that put people first.

Further we wish to position ourselves as a delivery partner that can work with international institutions and multilateral agencies such as the FAO and International Trade Centre. Our project delivers on their existing goals yet our reach is too small and thus we are not on their radar. Partnerships with organisations at this scale will ensure the reach and impact I know we can achieve.