Our latest news, blogs, ideas, tips and opinion pieces
UK Hack Weekend – May 4-5 London
Are you an experienced coder, tester or designer that wants to contribute your skills to a socially and ecologically transformative project? Are you new to software and want to join a project that will help you develop your skills? Do you hate a series of vague...
Learning as a Community
Announcing OFNs free group coaching programme for food hubs. The OFN community is rich with experience in creating values-driven food systems. OFN members work with local authorities to deliver on strategic health outcomes. They coordinate with local food banks to...
5 things you might not know OFN can do…
1. Print all your invoices in one click. This brand new feature is a huge time saver. Instead of clicking through each customer one by one, you can simply select all of the invoices for an order cycle or date range and generate a single PDF that includes them all....
Coming to ORFC? Explore how OFN could work for you and pre-order your sail-freighted olives, oil and nuts.
For those of you who will be at the Oxford Real Farming Conference (ORFC) on 4th January we hope that you will join the session hosted by OFN's Lynne Davis. We will be asking four of our users to talk briefly and answer questions about how they are using OFN to...
Open Invitation to all Food Assemblies!
Today Food Assembly announced that it will be ceasing UK trading in September. Since 2014 The Food Assembly have been supporting individuals to become food activists, supporting producers to sell locally, and supporting shoppers to know the people that produce...
How to decentralise our food system
Most of our food is sold through a handful a supermarket chains that operate the same business model, a centralised model that aggregates all products under one roof. Can decentralised aggregation shift power away from supermarkets? Touring the country, it is...
What is the Open Food Network?
Using software and technology to pioneer ideas in building networks, cooperatives and community driven food enterprise, the Open Food Network is growing as an international community. An international community fundamentally working to address very local problems....
George Monbiot – OFN Ambassador
George Monbiot says “For years I have been writing about the need for a fairer, more sustainable food distribution system. It appears that we now have it. The online, open source, not-for-profit Open Food Network is owned and controlled by the people...
Rob Hopkins – OFN Ambassador
Rob Hopkins has been following the progress of OFN since April 2014. In his words “there is a lot of potential for building the resilience of local food economies through internet-based, community-led food hubs – all of which is very close the aims of the...
Mary Clear – OFN Ambassador
Mary Clear, Chair of Incredible Edible Todmorden says “The Open Food Network is not only a great way to get local food to local people. It is also the only open source online food distribution system. It is really important that as we are building...
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.