We did indeed send the application outlined above to the European Social Innovation Competition for the 2014 edition. The application included a practical activity to map local farmers, in collaboration with the unMonastery project in Matera, South Italy. Our team made it to the 10 finalists, so we were invited to Brussels for the pitching and award ceremony. But in the end, we were not among the three winners.
After that:
It turned out to be too difficult to turn the farmer mapping in Matera into a useful trade connection, esp. as our collaboration with Maria Pierra in Matera was new, we had challenges working remotely together.
On other fronts, we reached out to various governmental initiatives across Europe to evaluate potential collaborations. One contact to such a government-provided local food platform in Hessia, Gemany, seemed very promising: they had all the farmers on the platform, we had all the tech, and they were interested to collaborate. Then our contact person in that local government office suddenly died. Another contact with Gutes vom Bauernhof in Austria provided a lot of inspirations (they have really good ideas and policies!), but ultimately did not result in an active collaboration.
Around that time, I was in Nepal and came back with the idea to organize direct sales for farmers in Nepal instead – the potential improvement for a farmer’s life is much higher there than in Europe, even with the modest trade volume that would be expected at first. That was the start of Edgeryders powered coffee from Nepal, and by means of recursive problem solving lead to the current open source optical coffee sorter project.
In Europe, building a distribution network for local food means competing in the oligopolist food retail market, which is no match for a small company or network. So unless a major shift in consumer preferences or a major economic crisis happens, I see no opportunity for such a move. Market structures in other parts of the world are not as efficient and not as rigid, and inequalities are even much higher, so personally rather want to invest the little means I have there.
Interestingly, the coffee project is not any more about necessarily international trade relations. If and as long we find direct sales options inside Nepal for the quantities we have access to, we’ll do that. That’s why @anu and I are working on setting up a small roastery and coffee processing plant in Nepal.