Software designed for food

The Open Food Network software platform allows farmers to sell produce online, at a price that works for them. It can be embedded in your own website, or hosted on ours. It has been built specifically for selling food so it can handle tricky measures or stock levels that only food has – a dozen eggs, a bunch of parsley, and a whole chicken that varies in weight, anyone?

It’s a great shopfront to sell food through as an individual enterprise, but where it really gets exciting is when there’s a community of farmers working together.

Collaboration made easy

Food producers can create an online shop, collect payments, and sell through other shops on the platform. Wholesalers can integrate with existing systems, manage buying groups and supply your produce through national or regional networks of food hubs and shops. Communities can bring together producers in your area to create a virtual farmers’ market, building a resilient local food economy.

People have used the power of this platform to create food collectives, manage food hub stock, or to take their farmers’ market online with pre-purchases to give stallholders more secure sales.

Open source for a better food system

And what’s just as important as the software itself, are the values that underpin it. If you’re trying to build a new food system – as a farmer, farmers’ market, or food hub – then why would you choose software that isn’t also contributing to a fairer food system? By working collectively rather than competitively, we share the costs of developing new software, and we ensure that our project is more resilient than the many other proprietary models that have fallen over since we started!

Read more about how to use the software in our User Guide, or you can email us with any questions, including help getting set up using the Open Food Network.