The new normal is local

Local2Local (L2L) aims to remove obstacles in the transition to a sustainable, regionally rooted food system by enabling and strengthening short food supply chains (SFSC). In addition to developing our own short food chain concepts and tools, we collaborate with existing initiatives and stakeholders and support these with a broad producer network and years of experience in creating demand-driven and transparent supply chains.

As a business, L2L is working to provide farmers with greater regional and market access through logistics, marketing and IT-support. We assist with the physical aggregation and coordination of produce for farmers and enable them easy access to markets via e-commerce. Since its inception in 2014, Local2Local has become a leading short food supply chain initiative in the region of Utrecht, reaching a break-even point in 2019 and nearly doubling revenue in 2020. On a more strategic level, L2L organizes community building and educational events, is lead partner in three regional alliances (Utrecht, Flevoland and Amsterdam Metropolitan Area), collaborates with 7 other regional short food supply chain initiatives, is the co-founder of the Task Force Short Chain, and a leading case study in the SMARTCHAIN H2020 consortium.

Local2Local Food provides the B2B and B2B2C market with regionally sourced produce through the L2L IT-platform.

Behind this platform there is a team working on customer care, sales, administration, logistical coordination, IT facilitation, onboarding of producers and products, expansion of the farmer groups and the development of fresh new products. This platform ensures ease of use and transparency and can be used for SFSC-initiatives and vendors, Smart City logistics, customer support and product-market concepts.

The L2L-format is set up to scale up, other regions and initiatives can easily implement, align, connect and collaborate. Today the platform represents over 400 farmers and producers and provides more than 1000 products to a large variety of customers.

The strength of Local2Local’s Food Distribution Software (FDS) lies in the integral management of the entire chain. FDS can be purchased and activated by any food chain-related company or initiative (white label).

FDS was created from eight years of practical experience in short food chain development, with services such as the Greenbee, Beebox, Local2Local, Meat Your Own, the Krommerijnkrat and Streekmolen.

We have incorporated all our best practices and work with them ourselves on a daily basis. Because we continue to innovate, we work on the further development of FDS on a daily basis. All of our affiliated partners reap the benefits of this.

The current agricultural production in the regions is largely focused on export. In order for farmers to achieve a significant market share in their own region, we believe that we should make production dependent on demand, linking it directly to the needs of city residents, who prefer to eat local food and thus invest in their immediate living environment.

On the Let’s Get Local-platform a farmer can easily register a product or cultivation wish. Companies and consumers make this wish a reality by making a pre-sale purchase on the future. A product is created with only winners. The customer gets the best product and the farmer the opportunity to become more sustainable.

Agriculture is in the midst of a transition, a transition to sustainable production focused more on local sales with climate change as a key driver. Extreme rainfall is rapidly followed by long periods of drought. Our average meal covers a great distance, the revenues leave the region and the consumer doesn’t know what is going on with local farmers. This requires an intervention. 

We want to connect the city with the countryside, connect citizens directly with farmers. Farmers provide more than just food production and citizens can and want more than just consume. 

• The soil can store water
• The crops store CO2
• The farmer maintains biodiversity

At the moment, the farmer is not rewarded for these added values and cannot invest in the soil.

Local2Local aims to solve this with a 100% transparent, regenerative regional food system, by way of our Blockchain-solution. This way the farmer can show what he means to us, the chain can be traced from ‘soil to plate’, we can pay him a fair price for product values that can be accounted for and the customers (read: citizens) can have very real and positive impact on their living environment.