Food Hubs

Example

Australia

Interview by Darren Sharp:

"In Australia Food Hubs exist at all shapes and sizes – they are essentially intermediaries that facilitate access to local food. It’s about getting food from local farmers to local people. So as a customer you get access to food from a bunch of local farmers that you can identify through radical transparency.

Food Hubs are community-led, ethically-driven and accountable to the people they serve. It’s about putting power over the food system back into the hands of the community and local farmers. It could be anything from a buyers’ group, to a large warehouse or regional produce player.

We want lots of these Food Hubs to emerge so we can get distributed activity occurring to provide alternatives for the community and challenge the mainstream food industry. The Open Food Network is addressing this by developing tools and software that makes it easier to connect farmers, food hubs and the community.

The first thing we’re trying to do is develop flexible tools as everyone will come up with slightly different solutions and business models depending on their local context. The next part of it lies in the power of networks. We see the opportunity for farmers to be linked by multiple Food Hubs, which is part of how you open up the marketplace.

By lowering the cost of connecting and transacting you’re actually giving power back to the farmers. In terms of governance, the farmer and the customer gets to choose who they want to do business with and have a stake in. By reducing the barriers to entry we’re hoping to see more diverse options emerge in the food system.

People often ask us how we will ‘control’ who uses the system. We don’t want to take on an ‘accreditation’ task – we do want it to be easier for people to choose who they trade with and buy through based on information and recommendations from others. Eventually we’re hoping to get to the point of having peer-to-peer recommendations. So it’s not the software’s responsibility to ‘accredit’ that information but rather to support a transparent way for businesses to build up reputation through relationships." (http://www.shareable.net/blog/the-open-food-foundation-free-software-for-better-food-systems)