“Food Revolution Day on 19 May is a chance for people who love food to come together to share information, talents and resources; to pass on their knowledge and highlight the world’s food issues. All around the globe, people will work together to make a difference. Food Revolution Day is about connecting with your community through events at schools, restaurants, local businesses, dinner parties and farmers’ markets. We want to inspire change in people’s food habits and to promote the mission for better food and education for everyone.”

Food Revolution Day was kicked off by the effervescent Jamie Oliver, who has been working hard since his early days as a celebrity chef, to train his passions on creating a better relationship between individuals, communities and food. We have a lot of respect for Jamie’s work on social enterprise projects such as Fifteen, Ministry of Food, and Kitchen Garden Project.

We decided we wanted to get involved, to lend our voice and our creativity to the Food Revolution, to support the vision of a global population which is better educated about food.  We joined Google, Spotify, IDEO, & Twitter, in pledging our company’s part in the food revolution – after all, we’re all about creating the tools for a better food system.

This year, we’ve committed to supporting better food in the workplace, and more food education for individuals in our networks.  We’re also wanting to train our creative talents on 19th May, on capturing the buzz in the local food movement.  We’re going to be out and about in Wellington, New Zealand, grabbing some of the excitement, colours, textures & delicious looking food at the Hill Street Farmers Market.

The only question left really, is ‘What are you going to be doing for Food Revolution Day?’.

How could you argue with a man this passionate about a better food system?

You can follow our day’s adventures on Facebook & Twitter - and we’ve fired up a Storify too to celebrate the #FoodRevolution internet action.

Our photos of #FoodRevolution Day are up on Facebook here now.

Or, follow the Storify here, as it evolves:

#FoodRevolution Day through the eyes of Bucky Box

Celebrating the world wide day of action for better education about Food.Bring on the #FoodRevolution!!

Storified by Bucky Box · Thu, May 17 2012 23:46:05

How do we create a food system which is sustainable in the face of growing population pressures, changing weather patterns, declining natural resources, and a sharp decline in soil health?

This is one of the questions we held, when we recently headed to the shores of Australia to attend the National Sustainable Food Summit in Sydney, to hang out with some of the visionaries who are engaged in the dialogue of how the future of Australia’s food system will play out.

The summit was re-convened after last year’s successful meeting which brought people from around the country to listen to key note speakers, and engage in workshop sessions to talk about & co-create the future.

Several of the attendees were live tweeting the event on the hashtag #FoodSummit & #SFS12, and a Storify was being built as the event progressed: you can check it out here.

Asides from the fascinating conversations, great connections & pretty tasty conference food, there was a fair few insights into where the food system would be moving over the course of the next 20 years or so, and it’s our recollection of these insights we want to try and capture for you:

• The food system, much like other industries around the world, is one of the next major industries that will become decentralised thanks to the web, peer-to-peer trading, and as a response to 30 years of legacy which has served financial interest more than the people & planet it relies upon.
• A flexible, resilient & sustainable food system is already emerging, and with software & other food tech as a catalyst, is going to emerge even more rapidly. It will form a meshed web reaching around the world, of localised food systems within a bigger global food system.
• The food system of the future will be complex – made up of traditional agriculture, urban agriculture, small-scale farms, bio-domes, vertical growing spaces, hydroponics, backyard gardening, community gardening, and more.
• Organic Farming can feed 10 billion people, and small-scale sustainable agriculture is the way it will happen. Several recent reports, including one from the UN Special Rapporteur have identified this, and there is a growing focus on ecological / biological farming methods.
• We will have to shift from the 99% industrialized food system we currently have globally, as resource pressures (peak oil & the likes) will mean current techniques will continue to push the cost of food up.  The transition may not be easy for all concerned, those with vested interests in keeping the status quo are likely to resist, but they will be swept away if they do not change (see changes in Music Industry!).
• Huge advancements can be made as we shift to a decentralized food system, especially in the area of food & resource waste, which accounts for the main reason for current artificially high prices.  In 2010 we produced enough food to feed c.12 billion people, we just wasted a large portion of it.
• Changing the ‘profit centre’ squeeze of Food Distribution, will ease the financial, environmental & social strain currently put on food production & consumption.
• Local & Regional food economies will be rejuvenated with a new set of values based on more than profit, beginning with the foundations that People & Planet should be at the centre of the food system, with Money/Profit playing the role of social exchange lubricant rather than sole economic measurement.
• The emergence of vege box schemes, CSA’s, co-ops, buying groups & food hubs are all proving the future path of the food system right now. Software is a major lever to catalyse these forms of enterprise.
• More farmers will be needed and more small-scale distributors.
• The future food system will have a much greater transparency & traceability from Farm to Fork, enabled by food tech.

There were of course many many more, but these are some of the strongest trends that we heard at the conference.

The early keynote by Jeremy Rifkin was one of the talks which set a lot of the context for the conference, and whilst it’s fairly lengthy – there’s some great insights into economic trends which are worth a watch.

Take a look at more of the notes, podcasts, videos & other Food Summit resources collated by the 3 Pillars Network.

The summit felt like a positive reinforcement for a project we’ve already committed to, a great learning experience to push the boundaries of our knowledge, and a great opportunity to share space with so many other who had a similar vision of a decentralised food system.  We’re really excited by some of the projects which are happening around Australia, and indeed around the world as we speak – one of the blogs which we follow regularly is Food+Tech Connect which showcases some of the most exciting Food Tech projects in the States (and a few like us, outside). Make sure you read the ‘Hacking The Food System’ articles.

We recently spoke at the Changemakers Convention in Christchurch, New Zealand, where people from around the country outlined their passions, visions & actions in their chosen area of interest.  We spoke about “Food Security & Resilience in an Uncertain Future”, which led us to deliver a ‘state of the nation’ of how our food system currently teeters, some examples of food system fragility (largely taken from our blog about disasters & resilience), and the bright future that is emerging with technology enabling new ways for our food system to thrive.

For now, it’s back to work on supporting our fantastic beta customers, and spreading the word to more local food distributors who might make use of our system – please feel free to share with your networks if you might know someone who would like to change the food system for the better!

Well lately we’ve been admiring from afar the awesome Lexicon of Sustainability (photography of Sustainability initiatives) and Perennial Plate video series focused on adventurous & sustainable eating.

We wanted to share with you some of our favorite features of each of their work, but strongly encourage you to seek them out and spend some time flicking through more of their fantastic creative outpourings of local food goodness.

First up, the wonderful photography of the Lexicon of Sustainability…

See more of the Lexicon of Sustainability’s photgraphy exhibit here.

And here’s the very talented Daniel Klein and his video series ‘Perennial Plate’

You can find more of the Perennial Plate video series at the website here, or at their vimeo stream here.

We’re looking forward to releasing a few of our own creative projects in the not too distant future. If you know of any other great uses of design / creativity / the arts, to celebrate & catalyse the local food movement, please send us a link!

Image courtesy of Lexicon of Sustainability

Let’s take a step back – the last 50 or 60 years has been a pretty formative time here on Earth, with a couple of competing ideologies having diverged how various nations have approached creating prosperity for their citizens. I grew up in the ‘Western world’ which took a Capitalist approach to things. Undoubtedly there has been significant advancements in standard of living, and drastic shifts & innovation in many industries. Only now, however, is mass awareness emerging for how this value is being ‘created’ and at what cost.

From my understanding, it’s fair to say a lot of this prosperity has been borrowed from Earth & borrowed from our future. Capitalism has ramped up the Industrialised way of ‘manufacturing value’ over the last 50-60 years, which could be characterized as largely ‘extractive’ and linear in it’s approach to creating good & services; extract, process, trade, dispose. We’re now seeing around the world that this paradigm is not only unsustainable with a growing global population, but is in fact simply a race to the bottom.

This conference titled ‘The Biological Business Model’

Image courtesy of weretable: http://bit.ly/H6uUQa

began with the basic idea of regeneration of environmental, social & cultural capital, to create prosperity for People & Planet. It identified, of course, that people & planet are inseparable as we exist in a Living System, and therefore what’s good for the planet is also good for us.

We delved into Dr Sahtouris’ 16 principles for a business or organization which can create Regenerative value, which are inspired by her work in the deep study of nature, and the billions of years in which evolution has happened. Some people call the application of nature’s principles “Biomimicry”. I want to share these principles (which are available on Elisabet’s site) with you all as I find them really insightful:

1. Self-creation (autopoiesis)
2. Complexity (diversity of parts)
3. Embeddedness in larger holons and dependence on them (holarchy)
4. Self-reflexivity (autognosis/self-knowledge)
5. Self-regulation/maintenance (autonomics)
6. Response ability to internal and external stress or other change
7. Input/output exchange of matter/energy/information with other holons
8. Transformation of matter/energy/information
9. Empowerment/employment of all component parts
10. Communications among all parts
11. Coordination of parts and functions
12. Balance of Interests negotiated among parts, whole, and embedding holarchy
13. Reciprocity of parts in mutual contribution and assistance
14. Efficiency balanced by Resilience
15. Conservation of what works well
16. Creative change of what does not work well

The interesting part of this for me, is beginning to form a model for how we can build better businesses in c21st.

Image courtesy of gijsbertkoren : http://bit.ly/H6uUQa

How do we build businesses based on the fundamental needs of our global society rather than short term fads and wants? How do we ensure our businesses really create value (social, environmental, cultural & economic combined) rather than taking from the future generations? How do we build the future of business in the mold of mature ecosystems (cooperative & incredibly efficient) instead of pioneering ecosystems (competitive & wasteful)?

We’re going to be taking some great learnings away from this conference and seeing where we’re working well and where we can improve. We can already see there’s some good elements to our model, but we think we can do more, inspired by 3.8 billion years of evolution.

“No Business has ever faced a challenge that a Rainforest has not already created a solution for.”
~ Elisabet Sahtouris

If any of that is interesting to you, make sure you check out:

Elisabet Sahtouris’ website
Biomimicry Design Inspiration : AskNature
Biomimicry 3.8 : the portal to all things Biomimicry
Ashton Wylie Trust – hosts of the event

We arrived at work to find the twitter feed was ticking over happily with RT of the FastCoExist piece on Bucky Box’s software for a better food system.

FastCoExist is one of our favourite reads. It provides daily news on ‘World Changing Ideas & Innovation’, many of them businesses working for a better world.  It’s a great feeling to be part of that club.

Bucky Box is working on the new operating system for emerging local food systems. We’re open for beta testing in invite-only form. Feel free to share the word to local food distributors you think might be interested.

Creating the new operating system for local food isn’t just about supporting what’s going out in the market, it goes much bigger & broader than that, it reaches into the future.  We see what has happened in the last 30-40 years in our global food systems as a step backwards in environmental & social standards which have borrowed from our future. We’ve created a more fragile food system with less resilience, and now the pressures are beginning to mount up : population growth, soil health, water quality, climate change adaptation, loss of biodiversity and ecosystem functions which are vital to our survival.  All the research points toward moving to sustainable food production, distribution & consumption, which largely means small scale farms (not industrial-scale mono-cropping), regenerative farming techniques (not chemical farming which destroys our soils) and regional food systems (not industrialized supply chains).  We see a better way, and Bucky Box is our first step in making that vision a reality.

Not only are we creating cutting-edge software for the local food movement, but our social enterprise structure means that we’re going to be putting a minimum of 66% of our profits back into the movement itself through our partnerships with local food systems researchers, advocates, educators & practitioners. More to come on that matter soon, so connect with us at @buckybox and be the first to hear.

It’s that time again! We’re welcoming the next round of local food enterprises who want to do away with painful admin, and move into the new, easier era of local food distribution.

Beta testing round 1 went well enough for us to open the doors to more awesome local food distributors.

If you’re running a local food delivery business that needs help on the time consuming customer support, delivery logistics, and billing side of things, we’re keen to hear from you. We aim to get 2 days of your operational work down to 2 hours weekly.

Sound like you?

Here’s the qualifiers we’re looking for:

• You are currently operating a delivery scheme with at least 50 customers.
• You’re reasonably tech savvy & fairly relaxed – we class this as comfortable in GMail & willing to work things out with us if there’s a bug or two, rather than shouting down the phone.
• You deliver a standard product such as a Box of seasonal produce. This can be a ‘mystery box’ or a even a clearly defined product like a green juice or a loaf of bread.
• Likes and Dislike preferences
• ‘extras’ & ‘à la carte‘ ordering is coming soon but not included in this round (e.g. ad hoc extras attached to an order, or a custom build box with veges A, B and C)
• Any repeating delivery cycle is okay this means weekly, fortnightly, daily on specific days, or one-off orders.

If this still sounds like you then drop us a line on beta@buckybox.com, we’re limiting this round to approx 12 beta customers, first come first served.

If you’re not eligible, or you’re just the kinda person that likes to spread the word, pass it onto your friends – hit us up at @BuckyBox on twitter.

(confused, or don’t know what all this local food jargon means – check out the guide here!)

Imagine a future where there’s significant community investment to help you grow the local food movement. That’s the future where we spent our morning.

We were listening to a webinar from the National Good Food Network on innovative & unexpected ways to raise capital for your ‘more than profit’ enterprise.

Here’s our run down of the event, we hope it’s of use!

Awesome poster courtesy of A Snail's View http://bit.ly/AaCqom

We’ve been getting all inspired by watching some movies as of late. We’d like to share these two from The Twelve Films Project, as they exhibit the grass roots shift to fresh, seasonal, local produce which is happening around the world.

“LOCAL”

“Farm to Trailer”

We were specifically interested in the debate on ‘Local’ regarding organics and the meta trend we see toward knowing your farmer & their methods.  We’d love to hear your thoughts on how either the FoodTech industry, or us here at Bucky Box, could facilitate this happening for consumers.

We see the need for transparency and traceability in the food system, so we’d love to hear of other initiatives we could tie in with, or new ideas for how we can make the food system fairer for growers & consumers.

A return to a people & planet friendly food system is happening, now lets think about how we can speed it up.

Idealog is the magazine and website of New Zealand creative business, ideas and innovation.

“A fresh new Kiwi startup is out to help the local food movement by taking admin hassles out of the equation so farmers can spend more time growing their tomatoes and less time sorting out receipts”

Check out the story about our startup : Bucky Box – local food software here!!

Idealog featured our not just the software side of our business, but also the social enterprise ‘purpose above profit’ ethos & structure of Bucky Box, as well as Enspiral – the collective of developers & designers who work on social change projects.

Yesterday we stumbled across a cool little animation of Michael Pollan’s RSA speech entitled ‘Food Rules’ (also the title of his new book).  We thought it was worth a share;

We’ve also been loving the wonders of Food+Tech Connect’s infographic updates – well worth tuning into their stream!

In the meantime, here’s a couple of our favourite infographics going around at the moment:

courtesy of ArchiCulture

check out more from Wired Magazine at their article about the Future of the Food System infographics page

PETA try to woo us to go vegan with their infographic showing resource use in meat production

the cold hard economic facts & health statistics from GoBankingRates about Government subsidies for certain crops in the USA

courtesy of Cool Infographics who created this great insight into why we should choose organic food, for Organics Canada

We’ll also throw in this other quirky Michael Pollan ‘Food Rules’ video for your viewing pleasure:

Send us links to your favourite infographics today!

To this end, we’ve spent a fair bit of time using our blog, twitter & facebook to share our thoughts and the developments behind the scenes of Bucky Box.

We were very lucky to find an awesome partner in SocialFlow, who we are working with to get our words out to the right people at the right time, with their great app which handles our twitter & facebook feeds. You might see our posts are now popping up powered by their service.

Things we love about SocialFlow:

• scheduling & analytics for sharing content
• insights & visuals to show us how our comms develop over time
• awesome friendly support staff

SocialFlow were recently featured in TechCrunch as they have just launched publicly! So you too can now get in on the service.  Have a read of their profile, and check out their sparkly new website which features their Social Media Optimiser.

So a big thanks to the team at SocialFlow for a fantastic application which helps us talk with the amazing people involved in the local food movement around the world, and thanks for believing in our vision!

So if you’re running a local food delivery business that needs help on the time consuming customer support, delivery logistics, and billing side of things, we’re keen to hear from you. We’re aiming to get 2 days of your operational work down to 2 hours weekly.

Sound like you?

Here’s the qualifiers we’re looking for:

• You are currently operating a delivery scheme with at least 30 customers.
• You deliver a simple “box”. This can be a mystery box or a even a clearly defined product like a green juice or a loaf of bread.
• We cater for Likes and Dislike preferences
• “Extras” are okay (e.g. $30 medium vege box plus $5 coffee extra)
• ala-carte ordering is not (e.g. give me a custom box with veges A, B and C)
• Any repeating delivery cycle is okay this means weekly, fortnightly, daily on specific days, or one-off orders.

If this still sounds like you then drop us a line on beta@buckybox.com, we’re limiting this round to approx 12 beta customers, first come first served.

If you’re not eligible, or you’re just the kinda person that likes to spread the word, pass it onto your friends – hit us up at @BuckyBox on twitter.

(confused, or don’t know what all this local food jargon means – check out the guide here!)

Wow, what an absolutely amazing day I’ve had with my laptop, the TEDxManhattan conference, and the twittersphere!

As I woke up at 4.30am to watch the TEDx conference livestream, I don’t have the energy to give you a full write up just now, I did curate this storify feed of my favourite tweets from the event to give you a feeling for the event, and if you watch the Changing The Way We Eat website, there will be all the videos up soon!

Make sure you don’t miss Stephen Ritz from the Green Bronx Machine!

Enjoy!!

Direct link to Bucky Box’s TEDxManhattan storify story can be found here.

or here is the embedded version:

Our founder, Will, had chatted with their writers about our vision for mainstream organic farming, and a people & planet friendly food system, as well as filling them in on the social enterprise angle of our work, where we aim to support champions around the world who work on research, education, capacity building & awareness raising for a better food system.

Do take the opportunity to check out the article, entitled “NZ Social Enterprise Bucky Box to Simplify Distribution for Sustainable Farmers with Web-based Application”

If you’ve not read Seedstock before, and you have an interest in sustainable agriculture focusing on startups, entrepreneurship, technology, urban agriculture, news and research – then you should head on over to their site right now!

Big thanks also to all the people who picked up the article, and are sharing with their networks – a significant boost came from Food+Tech Connect and Slow Food USA through twitter!

We are big fans of the work the 30 Project have done already, and inspired by their vision to ‘be a think + do tank for changing the food system‘.

They aim to tackle the food distribution problem – 1 billion obese, 1 billion starving.  Through initiatives such as the FEED Project and now ChangeDinner, the 30 Project aims to “bring together key organizations and activists working around the world on addressing hunger, obesity, and agriculture issues to talk about their visions for the food system and the next 30-years. Many of the best anti-hunger and anti-obesity organizations have been so focused on their important work that they have not been able to work together on common challenges. The 30 Project is gathering the best people together to work towards creating a truly healthy and sustainable global food system.”

If you haven’t already seen Ellen Gustafson, the founder of 30 Project, speaking at TEDxEAST – here’s her 10 minutes of passion & purpose:

You can support 30 Project directly here, Follow @the30Project on Twitter, or dive into some of the Change Dinner videos like this one:

#ChangeDinner today!

The back story: in the early stages here at Bucky Box we decided to forego any marketing budget, and instead work with the best of the local & friendly food champions around the world and give our customers the chance to nominate where these funds will go. We see that these are the individuals & organisations who are making significant headway in catalysing, educating & advocating for a fair, friendly, local food system. We support their work to the hilt.