The Constantia Food Club, a Cape Town group buying club that connects small local growers and producers directly with customers, was announced as a global winner in the Xero Beautiful Business Fund on 15 November, with a R795 000 prize.
The competition received over 5 500 applications from small businesses across South Africa, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, the United States and the United Kingdom. There were 24 regional winners selected across the four prize categories, and ultimately one global winner for each category.
The Constantia Food Club won the global ‘Innovating for sustainability’ award for the way they support local regenerative farmers to help reduce biodiversity loss, promote sustainable food production and create a decentralised food system.
Courtney Atkinson, the co-founder and ‘host’ of Constantia Food Club said: “It’s been inspiring to see how our work is connecting more families with small food producers and farmers, and creating a healthier, more sustainable food system.”
A food club is a type of local group buying club that works as a decentralised alternative to the industrial farming and mass-supermarket system.
It provides a simple and transparent way to get access to healthier foods and better products more directly from the producers, and without all the excess delivery miles, packaging and the usual retail costs. And importantly, the farmers and food producers get to set their own prices, which creates a fairer and more transparent system for everyone.
It works somewhat like a limited-time online shop, except that unlike the usual online purchase with an individual and costly delivery each time, the food club collates all the members orders together into one order for each supplier, receives one delivery from those suppliers, and there’s one ‘market day’ for members to collect their goods from the club’s host.
It’s a smart food system that’s been working successfully across Cape Town suburbs for years. In fact, Jessica Merton, who hosts a food club in Vredehoek, founded the non-profit Food Hub web platform six years ago, which now powers and empowers over 33 community food clubs across the country.
For Jessica, an important focus of the food club system is transparency of where our food comes from, how it is made or treated, and how the farmers are fairly remunerated. “As testament to this,” she explains, “our members’ invoices indicate the percentage of their spend that went directly to the producers – a first for shoppers in South Africa.”
Referring to Constantia Food Club’s global prize, Courtney says, “this recognition from Xero just proves that this model works, and we can all ‘win’ – the farmers and producers dictate their prices, our members have access to better produce usually at a better price, and the host receives their purchases at cost.”
“We dream of a Food Club on every corner,” says Courtney. “That’s how we’ll unlock exponential change in our collective health, environment and local economy.”
