DirectFood.store - Securing the Food Supply Chain
Digital platform to connect consumers, restaurants, and local food producers.
Project Overview
Updated March 31, 2023.
The Problem
Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, Canadians have seen disruptions to the food supply chain. Some products have been in short supply. Others have gone to waste with the downturn in restaurant business.
Moreover, producers accustomed to dealing with a single buyer were caught with no way to distribute their products and faced large financial losses. To maintain safety and physical distance, grocery stores have also had to limit the number of customers shopping at any given time.
Meanwhile, there is a growing demand for fresh food delivery through subscriptions, part of a trend of healthier, additive-free food with traceable origins.
How We Are Solving It
The DirectFood.store project is aimed at using technology to create a one-stop shop for consumers to source fresh food directly from local producers, all without warehousing, processing facilities, stores or other distributors.
Led by Wisebox Solutions, the project brings together i-Open Technologies, Novex Delivery Solutions, the farms of Nutriva Group and Berryhill Growers, and two restaurants, Eat Fresh Pizza and Mission City Pizza.
Food producers list their available goods on a new website. Consumers can browse and select what they want, and their order will be ready for pick-up by delivery drivers the next day. The farmer gets paid the following day. There’s even a subscription option for consumers.
The platform provides other advantages for local farmers and producers. They can sell based on freshness and convenience to a new market previously beyond their reach. They also have access to analytical tools to help them make more sound business decisions around planting and harvesting.
Restaurants can use the system to order and take delivery of local products. They then have the advantage of advertising fresh, local ingredients, and through the traceability and transparency enabled by technology, can share which farms provided the ingredients.
The trial is taking place in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland and Fraser Valley. The plan is to expand across the province in late 2020 and expand nationally in 2021.
The Result
This project created the first-of-its-kind global marketplace, DirectFood.store, to connect consumers, restaurants and local food producers to address COVID-19 pandemic disruptions to the food supply chain. Over 300 small businesses and farms were able to go online with DirectFood.store to be discovered by local consumers. The additional creation of ChamberMarket.ca digitized 49 Albertan chamber of commerce networks with a direct-to-consumer marketplace that provides a one-stop-shop for supporting and buying local.
Project Lead
Project Partners
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"The Digital Technology Supercluster has not only supported an important and time sensitive project in DirectFood.store to deliver Truly Farm to Table during the second and third COVID waves, they then supported the critical pivot to empower Chambers of Commerce to lift up the small retail businesses that were disrupted the most during that same era. Thank you to the Digital Technology Supercluster for being an amazing partner in responsive innovation.”
CEO, Wisebox Solutions Inc. Watch the Truly Farm to Table Video -
“The Traceability work completed becomes very important as we look for new and innovative ways to leverage data collected by end users or devices to track what has impacted farm outcomes. We expect as regenerative practices become a key part of bigger initiatives like ESG, this data will become a solid foundation to build on and track over time.”
CTO, i-Open Technologies Inc.