Building functional food systems for sustainable nutritious food production, processing, distribution, & delivery to local & export markets.

Hello there, and good afternoon, it is some minutes past 3 Pm as I write down my thoughts on this weeks edition of The Food Renaissance, we had the debut on Growing, processing, distributing, and delivering nutritious food to everyone, everywhere, every time last week, if you missed it, you can read it here https://bit.ly/TheFoodRenaissance…

In it I introduced the mission to provide good food for everyone, everywhere, every time, and how there are a diversity of people to consider as we do this, I delved a little into the different parts that make up the food system briefly and I touched a bit on how we plan on achieving this at Quick Leap

This week I will like to continue where we left off last week in the introductory edition.

I typically spend a good portion of my week talking to food system actors; input providers, farmers, field agents, extension services providers, traders, food processors, Chefs, restaurant owners, hotel managers, and third party logistics providers, essentially everyone who is responsible for or plays a part in the production, processing, distribution & delivery of good food, and typically I am listening to the challenges they have & coming up with solutions alongside them, some other time it is helping walk them through how to think through solutions to real time challenges they face in the work they do.

This is what we signed up for at Quick Leap, the mission is to provide good food for everyone, everywhere, every time, essentially our day to day work entails developing and implementing or you can say building and implementing functional food systems that ensures that food of the best quality is produced, processed, distributed, and delivered to businesses, individuals, and families, locally & globally, we are at the early days and I will love to show you how we do this, more like take you a bit under the hood as to how this happens.

For good food to be produced, processed, packaged, distributed and delivered to people everywhere, you need a functional system that is resilient, one that work like a well oiled machine, and this involves people on the ground, ingenious, brave, people, systems, finances, and the right kinds of technology,

So how do you we go about achieving this? Collaborations!

We have literally built a system called Collaborator it is food system solution or better still an operating system that provides food system actors with the tools they need to produce; source & buy well graded, high quality raw materials, process, distribute, & sell nutritious food for the local markets, and for export markets.

How does this happen? Myself & the Growth team at Quick Leap Hannah Sorunke Glory Anene & Ruth Okoduwa discussed this more extensively in a knowledge share session yesterday on building resilient food supply chains for sourcing well graded, high quality raw materials, finding markets for growth & scale, if you would love to see it, you can check it out here; https://bit.ly/3ChtB3T

Typically these are the processes that are involved in getting food to markets, either local or export markets, and when I say markets I explicitly mean the people, businesses and organizations that need the food.

Putting it simply, you would typically have;

1. Production (the production stage has in it the farmers cultivating, harvesting and producing fresh produce, grains, also livestock production, fish and sea food cultivation & harvesting, everything literally).
2. Post harvest activities
3. Processing
4. Storage & distribution, which would entail wholesale & retail distribution, and
5. Delivery to consumers whether they are individuals, families, businesses, or organizations.

To ensure the quality of food that comes out on the other end, there needs to be careful attention payed to the details from the type & quality of seed or input, to the process of growing these foods, post harvest activities, processing, storage where applicable, distribution and delivering to individuals, families, businesses, or organizations everywhere.

How do you make sense of all of the moving parts? How do you eliminate inefficiencies and gain the advantage of compounded scale? You have to have a comprehensive system that captures all of the ecosystem and gives you the tools you need to carry out all of all these activities seamlessly and thrive while at it.

This is what is Collaborator is, it is a tool that enables the food system actors that we collaborate with to source and buy everything they need to create good food, and sell everything they create to local markets, regional markets, and export markets.

This tool simplifies the process for food system actors, it has been built for a literate & semi-literate audience, and it employs field agents, boots on the ground to serve farmers, traders, food processors, chefs, restaurants, hotels, individuals, and families, including international organizations like the FAO and other organizations who typically procure grains and other food items with a single stop to source and buy all they need as far as nutritious food & great food raw materials are concerned and to sell everything they create where applicable and have it delivered to anywhere in the world.

Useful tool yes? I like to think so too.

With Collaborator the actors and their activities are brought into one ecosystem, and served with the capabilities and the tools they need to do what do best with definite markets for all of the activities within the ecosystem across every value chain you can imagine. This approach eliminates inefficiencies, compounds scale, and delivers a resilient supply chain with multiple options across board, across value chains, as the output from each food system actor directly feeds in as input for the other food system actor; farmer to food processor, food processor to Chefs, restaurants, hotels, international markets, etc., And of course the overall output the nutritious food we need to nourish people everywhere.

This is how we are working at, building the ecosystem that empowers #foodsystemactors to ensure we have national food sufficiency, and that the world at large can have access to the food it need, so people everywhere can live happy and pursue all their dreams and aspirations.

Like I said earlier it is still early days, and we are rolling out these systems one capability at a time.

Let me know what you think about our approach to ensuring #zerohunger & #foodsecurity as we work at our mission of providing nutritious food for everyone, everywhere, every time.

I will see you next week, we will dive a bit deeper under the hood.

What would you like to learn about the food systems that create the food that nourishes you daily? Let me know please!

Do take Collaborator for a spin if you are a food system actor, I will like to know what you think!

Bye for now!

#thefoodrenaissance #nutritiousfood #foodsystems #Goodfood #thestaffofbread #zerohinger #foodsecurity #foodlikewater #abundance #collaborator #foodsystems