Over the past two months, we know many of you have been working around the clock to adapt to the ongoing fallout of the Covid-19 lockdown measures. The pandemic has been a source of huge challenges for local food producers and farmers’ markets, but it has also provided the local food community with new channels and tools for growth. For us, it has been inspiring to witness the ingenuity and resourcefulness that so many of you have demonstrated in the face of these challenging circumstances.

We have been busy too!  In partnership with Farmers Markets Ontario (FMO), we have onboarded more than 600 new vendors (across 26 farmers markets) over the past two months. Our new vendors, along with the many consumers who have turned to online shopping in the face of Covid-19 lockdowns, have driven unprecedented growth for us. Since April, we have seen web traffic increase 11-fold, to 10,000+ visits per week!

The growth that we have seen at Open Food Network Canada has also been experienced by Open Food Network hubs around the world. Since January, activity on Open Food Network sites globally has increased exponentially. Web traffic surged during the early days of lockdown, and has now plateaued at around 6-times our pre-lockdown levels.

Meanwhile, two new Open Food Network sites – in India, and in Turkey – have gone live, extending Open Food Network’s vision of sustainable, equitably-governed food systems into new bioregions.

What our growth means for our vision of an equitable and sustainable local food system

We have been thrilled to see the growth that our platform has experienced in recent months – but what matters to us most is that our growth actually supports the development of a more equitable and resilient local food system.

As a not-for-profit dedicated to supporting the growth of food sovereignty and sustainable local food systems, we believe that people have the right to healthy and culturally appropriate food, produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods.

We have designed our online marketplace to embody these values: It’s transparent, so produce can always be traced back to the hands that grew it. It’s open source, so that it’s owned by everyone — meaning that we don’t have a proprietary stake in our software. And it’s not-for-profit. The platform is designed to generate technological solutions for farmers, not profit off their labour — meaning that revenue is returned to the people that do the hard work of producing our food and tending the land.

We see our platform as something more than an online marketplace — we want it to be a space where the local food community can put the principles of open source development into practice, working collaboratively to share resources and define best practices together, so that innovations are shared in a ‘horizontal’ way, benefitting the local food community as a whole.

With that in mind, we are getting ready to launch an online community forum, where Open Food Network Canada users can meet each other, and support each other in learning the platform and make the best use of its tools and features.

In the coming months we will also be using our blog space to provide links to webinars, podcasts, and articles on topics such as food sovereignty, open source development, agroecology,  and other new developments in the local food system landscape. Through our global network, we are in touch with innovators, farmers, and food system scholars around the world — and we want to make these resources more accessible to our community members.

We know, too, that the bottom line matters — so we will also be rolling out support resources and webinars around practical issues such as marketing, business development, and social media outreach.

We know that have a lot left to learn from you — and from late summer into the fall we will be scheduling a series of zoom webinars and Q&A sessions, so that we can ‘check in’ with you to learn from your experience, refining that platform so that it meets your needs better — so that it continues to grow with you as your enterprises grow.

As always, thanks for being part of the Open Food Network community. You’re one of 17,000+ people around the world using the Open Food Network and we’re so glad you’re part of it!

The Open Food Network Canada team