Charmaine and Sarah started Merri Food Hub as a pop-up market in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, with a vision to connect their community with small, local, environmentally-conscious food producers. Today they run a weekly in-person market where locals can pick up orders placed through Open Food Network, or simply turn up and shop on the day.

Open Food Network gives them a free ordering system to track orders, anticipate demand, and coordinate their producers without the overhead of expensive software. The platform also powered a Good Food For All project that let them distribute food vouchers to locals in need, redeemable at their market.

Southern Harvest has been helping farmers and producers sell to their local community in the ACT and South East NSW since 2011. Their model has grown to include a weekly farmers’ market in Bungendore, a produce box scheme with 150 subscribers, an online farmers’ market, and seasonal events and farm tours throughout the year.

They use Open Food Network to manage both their produce box scheme and online market, and when COVID-19 hit and demand surged overnight, the platform helped them keep up. It gave them the coordination tools to scale quickly without losing track of their producers or their customers.

North Arm Farms is a collective of three family farms based in the Nambucca Valley on Gumbaynggirr Country: The Mandarin Bend, Autarky Farm, and Dolly’s Run. Formed in 2018, they share a belief that small-scale organic farming can build healthier, more connected communities, and that fresh seasonal food is part of how that happens.

Through their shared online shop on Open Food Network, they sell produce from their own farms alongside other local growers, delivering weekly to collection points across the Nambucca Valley and Bellingen. The platform lets three independent farms operate as one joined-up local food business, without losing what makes each of them distinct.

The Bright Food Co-op started in 2020 as a small group of locals buying bulk dry goods together to cut packaging and share costs. By 2021 they had their first home at a local café, and they now operate out of a rent-free space at Bright P-12 College, run entirely by volunteers with no one taking a profit.

Open Food Network is how they coordinate orders and bring local growers and makers together in one place, making it easy for households across Bright to access seasonal, local food. As they put it: “This open-source system helps us coordinate orders and bring small producers together in one place.”