We have created a low-profit company a couple of years ago aimed at facilitating local food consumption, minimizing food miles and time the food takes to go from “the plant to your table”. We are piloting it now in a province in the North East if Italy (Veneto) and now reviewing the business model in view of the lessons learned so far! Our dream is to make small scale, high quality food production sustainable, allowing people to access great, fresh and healthy food at a fair price! Possible? We believe so but it also implies a flavor of collaborative economy. We are getting there…for more info see our website www.food-republic.it room for collaboration?
The Food Assembly
Hi @Barbara!
Do you know https://thefoodassembly.com ?
AFAIK @Kathleen works with it in London and @Yatan Blumenthal Vargas in Berlin. I also have met founders in Paris during OuiShare Fest 2013 & 2014
Re: Food Assembly
Thanks @elf Pavlik. Yes we are familiar with their project but haven’t made direct contact! It is very very close to our concept and would be interesting to exchange notes on initial challenges and how these were overcome! It gives us lots of hope to see that others did something very similar and it’s having success! We think that’s the future of sustainable food production and consumption, breaking the long chain of food supply that homogenizes production and makes it impossible for small producers to access the market!
1 Like
What’s your state of tech dev for Food Republic?
Hi @Barbara, regarding collaboration potential: What softwere do you use for the prototype you’re running in Veneto? Because we / Epelia are done with the software part now (the new system running for 1 week stable, and Italian translation also done but not yet online). Four our part, we are now looking for small-scale farmers outside Germany who want to join the system, and people who want to organize a regional shipment cell (part of our logistics solution) at their location. It’s both for farmers selling regionally and internationally – but I guess you read that here already.
Of course this would mean using the epelia.com website for this – but even if you want to operate from your own website, we’d welcome discussing food software with you 
(You can also contact @Micha directly if you want, he’s managing the Epelia operation for the most part.)
RE: state of tech dev
Hi @Matthias and @Micha I’m not following directly the software part of the project. At the moment what we had was instrumental to launch the pilot and we would like now to enter into a second phase testing it with a different community. The difference with the Food Assembly concept, for example, is that we assumed that there would be an organic expansion of the initial group of families and that there would be one willing to act as ‘group leader’ and act as focal point for the collection of the food and division into individual families’ orders. this has proven challenging (and we think it is partially because the initial test group was not representative of our target) and we are now reassessing the business concept and will be ready to start with a new phase after the summer. We could potentially be interested in linking up with partners that share the same approach (of ‘un-chain’ the food chain, promote local small producer, creating ‘food communities’) and that would bring a dynamic, innovative spirit on the tech development side…I’m sorry our available info on the website is all in Italian, but if any of you would like me to provide a translation I would be happy to do so!