2025 has been an exciting year for the Open Food Network UK community.
From fish to flowers and vegetables to venison, 27,027 orders have been made across 3,863 active accounts, with the network growing to include almost 350 new enterprises – including 36 new food hubs – and reaching very nearly 2,500 additional customers. Our grateful thanks go to all our shopfronts and their customers for your continued support.
Reflections from the OFN UK team
Thanks are also due to our dedicated team here at the Open Food Network UK. Here’s what each of them had to say about their personal highlights of 2025.
Bethan Phillips
My highlight for 2025 (and on into 2026 and beyond!) is the fantastic news that we’ve been awarded funding for us to improve the user experience of Open Food Network, or, in other words, how people interact with our platform. You can read more about this here, as well as plans to develop and integrate an open-source ethical payment method too, and we’ll be keeping you up to date as the project progresses. It’s also been highly rewarding to work closely with the team at Coventry University and the food hubs involved in Procurement For Good this year, including visiting all four hubs earlier in the year to see the excellent work they’re doing on the ground.
Jo Da Silva
My highlight is the Procurement For Good project coming to life and feeling that as a partnership we could make some real progress in getting small scale, agroecologically grown food onto the public plate. We are working alongside some fantastic people and organisations and it is really inspiring to imagine what could be achieved over the four years of the project. Watch this space! Another project I’ve loved being part of is the Wild Venison Network. We’ve been working with the British Deer Society who are incredibly passionate and knowledgeable and I’ve learnt a great deal. We have built some good foundations and in 2026 I would love to see the adoption of the network by landscape-scale restoration projects that are looking to manage wild deer numbers and bring wild venison into their local food supply chains.
Francisco Martinez
My personal highlight for 2025 is the strategic opening up of Open Food Network UK to new and deeper partnerships, in particular with Coventry University. This collaboration has been transformative, enabling us to jointly secure the WINN Organic project and significantly strengthen our work on procurement, public plate access, and digital inclusion. Beyond the project itself, this partnership has reinforced OFN UK’s positioning as a credible and ambitious actor at European level, expanded our network, and created real learning and capacity-building opportunities for the whole team. The foundations laid in 2025 put us in a much stronger position to scale our impact, consolidate partnerships, and work more effectively as a group throughout 2026.
The Open Food Network UK October 2025 team gathering. Clockwise from lovable farm dog Spud (who made a guest appearance) are Sophie, Keval, Nick, Francisco, Jo and Bethan.
Sophie Paterson
For me, the chance for the OFN UK team to be together in person for a day in October was my absolute highlight, with thanks to Middle Ground Growers near Bath for hosting and feeding us as per the photo above. As a small remote team, we so rarely have the luxury of interacting beyond a screen and this was a very welcome and timely opportunity to take stock and plan for the next year ahead.
Keval Shah
I am excited to have joined the OFN UK team this year and that is my highlight of the year! It is great to be with and around such dedicated and passionate people who are all contributing towards a better and fairer food system. All the new projects coming in has been fantastic and means 2026 will be very exciting. I am really looking forward to helping shape OFN UK further.
Nick Weir
With my ‘global gardener’ hat on I am excited to see the OFN global community continue to grow. This year a team of farmers and community food entrepreneurs in Hungary deployed our core open source platform to create openfood.hu – I find it so inspiring that the OFN values are so universally attractive. Also (back in the UK) I am pleased to see that the Flower Grower Collective are building on their 2025 successes and will be opening a further two flower hubs (Bristol and East Sussex) in 2026.
Two 10 year OFNniversaries
Last but by no means least, we’re delighted that 2025 marked a whole decade of not one but two fabulous shopfronts growing their local food communities through the power of ethical open-source software here on the Open Food Network UK.
Congratulations go to Tamar Valley Food Hubs and The Tree St Andrews for a whole ten years as part of the Open Food Network UK family. Read more on this here.
We look forward to continuing to support Tamar Valley Food Hubs, The Tree and all of our fantastic food producers, hubs, collectives and more across the Open Food Network UK into 2026 and beyond.
