Our latest news, blogs, ideas, tips and opinion pieces
Reflections on diversity, food and farming in Britain
What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of a British farmer? Do you picture a white middle-class male who happens to reside in the countryside, understands the hidden culture of rural life, and seamlessly navigates the complex terrain of the...
A three step guide to improve your social media marketing
A well planned social media strategy can be a life saver for any food enterprise. It’s an easy, efficient and inexpensive way to grow your sales and generate a stronger relationship with your customers. As social media is such an essential tool to connect with your...
Lessons from COVID – Building resilience into our food systems
It might not have been as bad as some predicted, but COVID-19 certainly showed us that our food systems are vulnerable in times of crisis. In this blog Lynne Davis explores the lessons we can learn from the pandemic shock to build resilient future food systems. The...
Join our team as Software Support
The Open Food Network UK team are seeking a passionate and creative person to join our team in supporting our users - the food producers and food enterprises that are in our network. About the Open Food Network (OFN) During COVID the Open Food Network UK has grown...
How to immediately improve your food enterprise’s email marketing
Get Started!Email marketing is the most effective way to communicate with your customers. For example, an email is five times more likely to be seen than a Facebook post. This is because the Facebook algorithm only delivers your business page posts to a small...
Join Us! As our Food Hub Experience Designer
The Open Food Network UK team are seeking a passionate and creative customer and service experience designer to help us refine and optimise the end to end experience for our customers - the food producers and food hubs that are our network. About the Open Food...
Can I email my shoppers? And other frequently asked questions…
Regular emails are one of the most effective ways of keeping your community of shoppers in the loop. From experience we know that shoppers are more likely to order when they are reminded before the close of order cycles. We know they are more likely to feel part of...
How to help your customers commit to a better food system
After working so hard to supply food during lockdown, no enterprise wants to see their sales go back to pre-Covid levels. But as lockdown lifts, some customers may be returning to previous buying behaviours, like shopping in supermarkets. So how do we...
7 marketing tips to help you retain customers beyond Covid-19
Has your food enterprise seen overwhelming growth since lockdown began? The upside, in what has been a devastating experience for many, is that the Covid-19 pandemic has boosted the profile of small-scale and local food distribution. This means more people are...
Molly Scott Cato – OFN Ambassador
We’re thrilled to welcome Molly Scott Cato, former Green Party MEP for the South West, as an OFN Ambassador. She’s always been an advocate of green economics and localism so having her on board is pleasure for us! Here’s her comment on OFN: “We have long known that...
Celebrating nature and following its rhythms
Can you hear the birds chirping outside your window? This is the sound of Spring! The days are getting longer - finally! We will soon be leaving the dark half of the year and embracing the early spring rays of the Sun! Soon, it will be time to celebrate the Spring...
How to evade the Hungry Gap: an ethical guide for eaters and sellers
The hungry gap is a time when seeds that you’ve sown aren’t ready and whatever you stored in the winter isn’t good to eat anymore. In this blog post, we’ll look at what the hungry gap is in more detail. We’ll explore the gap’s origins, why we should embrace it and...
Open Food Network wins the award for digital innovation in the European Social Economy Awards
There were more than 500 nominations for this award from all over Europe. Open Food Network Europe gets the prize in the section about social economy initiatives operating in the digital economy or with an important focus on technological innovation and/or working...
Hybiau Caffael Bwyd Cynaliadwy yng Nghymru
Dros y flwyddyn ddiwethaf, mae'r Open Food Network UK wedi bod yn gweithio ar gynllun peilot arloesol i ddangos dichonoldeb cyflenwi bwyd lleol ar blât cyhoeddus Cymru. Gan weithio gyda phartneriaid o Ffermydd a Gerddi Cymdeithasol, Cultivate, Cymdeithas...
Sustainable Food Procurement Hubs in Wales
Over the past year, the Open Food Network (OFN) has been working on a groundbreaking pilot to demonstrate the feasibility of supplying local food onto the Welsh public plate. Working with partners from Social Farms & Gardens, Cultivate, Development Trusts...
In response to the Food Research Collaboration’s discussion paper
Natalie Neumann and Rosalind Sharpe from the Food Research Collaboration have created a Food Research Collaboration Discussion Paper titled “Sustainable food hubs and food system resilience: Plugging gaps or forging the way ahead?”This is the last report in the...
Open source tech: why you should care and how you can contribute
Open source is an integral part of who we are at the Open Food Network: our platform, the way we work and much more. It’s even in our name! So, let’s talk about it. In today’s society, open source software exists as an antithesis to the systems we have grown...
Women in Food and Farming
From farmers and food hub coordinations to home cooks and food tech developers, women are central to our food systems world wide. But other systems, like the patriarchy, undermine their contribution. At the Open Food Network, we try to counteract the impact of...
Starting the year at the Oxford Real Farming Conference
It was a great opportunity for us to share with our community some of the great work we have been doing and connect with like-minded people in an environment like the ORFC. And, we left Oxford full of hope and energy after meeting, hearing, and witnessing amazing speakers from all over the world.
The Open Food Network team goes to Hereford
Let’s try to picture the mycelium, billions of intricate connections building nature’s very own communication network. This, for us, is what we see the Open Food Network becoming. A network that connects people to each other to help build inter-connected communities.
As a fully remote team, connecting online can be easy with all the technology at our disposal. But connecting on a deeper level is harder, the same way it is harder for each of us individually to relate to each other and ourselves when we spend a lot of our time behind a screen.