Smallholder farmers are crucial to local food security, but have limited market access, margins, and access to innovations. Farmers who started working with sustainable agricultural practices have an additional challenge: commercialization of their sustainable products. Moreover, in a long food supply chain food loss adds up to 40% and a lot of single use plastic packaging is being used.
Fresh creates a local food economy by connecting smallholder farmers through its e-commerce. Fresh offers farmers 1) market access (also for organic products), 2) an increase of their income up to 20% through fair prices and limiting food loss, and will offer as a next step 3) advices to enable them to improve their sustainable production and commercialization based on collected data and best practices. At the same time, people get access to local, healthy products and the shortened value chain aims to limit food loss to <5% and to avoid >5 tons of plastic waste in 2021.