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Episode: The Digital Revolution of Small-Scale Farming

Author: EIT Food
Duration: 00:50:19

Episode Shownotes

In this episode of The Food Fight Podcast, our host Matt Eastland welcomes Pete Russell, the founder of Oooby, a groundbreaking platform reshaping the future of small-scale farming. As traditional food systems become unsustainable and disconnected from local producers, Oooby offers a decentralised solution that empowers farmers and reinvigorates community-based

food supply chains. Pete shares his entrepreneurial journey, from importing frozen pastries to realising his role in the problem of mass-produced food, and ultimately founding Oooby. The platform’s mission? To help small-scale farmers reclaim market share and thrive in an industry dominated by big corporations.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_00
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00:00:35 Speaker_02
We've all seen how big corporations often grow by buying out smaller companies and becoming powerful giants. And scale can mean choice, convenience and cost-effectiveness of foods.

00:00:47 Speaker_02
But large can have its downsides, such as harming the local environment, overly processed foods and weakening traditional community connections.

00:00:56 Speaker_02
Now people are craving simpler, more authentic connections and this shift is creating new demands that big corporations struggle to meet. So what does that mean now for small-scale producers?

00:01:08 Speaker_02
Hi everyone, I'm Matt Eastland and welcome to the Food Fight podcast brought to you by EIT Food. This series explores the greatest challenges in our food system, the innovators dedicated to solving them.

00:01:19 Speaker_02
Today, I'm super excited to welcome Pete Russell, founder of Ubi, to the show, a platform putting small scale back at the heart of our food systems.

00:01:28 Speaker_02
Over the past decade, Pete has built a decentralized marketplace that empowers local farmers and reconnects communities with their food sources.

00:01:35 Speaker_02
And in this episode, we'll explore Pete's journey from importing frozen pastries to founding a transformative platform for local food. Thank you for joining us, Pete. It's a real pleasure, Matt. Thanks for having me. Great to have you on the show.

00:01:48 Speaker_02
I was reading an article from 2021 around small scale farms, which said that data reveals that 100,000 UK farms have been lost since 1990, 100,000. which is staggering.

00:02:01 Speaker_02
And they talked about the reasons due to Brexit, COVID-19 and farms not being able to keep up the cost of maintenance, things like that, which really highlight the issues going on for small scale producers.

00:02:13 Speaker_02
And recently on the show, we also had a TikTok star on Young Farmer Will, episode 120 it was, who said there's just not enough opportunities for the next generation to get into farming because it's an unreliable industry.

00:02:27 Speaker_02
and he says it's very difficult to turn a profit and things like that. So he really highlighted how hard it is as a farmer and particularly as a small-scale producer. So do you think that small-scale producers are doomed in this day and age?

00:02:41 Speaker_01
I think they have been doomed. 100,000 of small-scale farms are at least down to 10,000. Really? That's scary. That's nine times decimation, right? Yeah.

00:02:55 Speaker_01
The way I look at it is it's been a pattern that's occurred over the last four generations with the green revolution, the onset of the green revolution just after World War II.

00:03:07 Speaker_01
being a real catalyst for larger scale production and that then brought the whole supermarket model to bear, which then brought the whole sort of industrial food model to play.

00:03:18 Speaker_02
Yeah, which of course back in the day was seen as really important and it was necessary to get the calories.

00:03:23 Speaker_01
It was absolutely necessary. And I think the other point to make up front here is This isn't about blaming or pointing fingers at anyone. This is just a human nature phenomenon that we're going through.

00:03:33 Speaker_01
And what's coming up next isn't again, a human nature phenomenon that we'll go through and we're all just playing our part in it. It's just recognizing the cycles. So you said a hundred thousand since 1990. I mean, that's insane. That's 30 years.

00:03:46 Speaker_01
So for those hundred thousand farms that have gone under, they met their doom.

00:03:52 Speaker_04
Yeah.

00:03:52 Speaker_01
No, doom's already happened. And the question I think, is that doom going to continue? And no, I don't think it is. In fact, I think that's what happens is like after a bushfire goes through, it never completely kills all of nature.

00:04:06 Speaker_01
In fact, it primes a space for that whole new regeneration to happen. So yes, doom has happened and now we're seeing the green sheets coming through and it's really evident.

00:04:17 Speaker_02
And Ubi was born out of a moment when you actually realised you were part of the problem, right? So you saw that in the global food system you were actually causing more problems and how can you help small-scale producers instead?

00:04:31 Speaker_02
So can you share that story with us and how did that realisation of the fact that you thought actually I'm contributing, how did that lead to the creation of Ubi?

00:04:40 Speaker_01
I grew up in a little small holding out southwest of Sydney, and my mum was into permaculture and all that sort of stuff. So my childhood and background was all very much around small scale and organic and that sort of thing.

00:04:55 Speaker_01
But I'm an entrepreneur, and as a young man getting into business, it was all in the pursuit of the dollar. And at one point we, a few friends and myself had a patisserie in Marrickville in Sydney, and it was our own, it was a kitchen.

00:05:08 Speaker_01
We had our own pastry chefs and kitchen hands, and we were baking pastries like croissants and Danish and stuff from scratch. and selling them to around 100 cafes around Sydney, all the sort of the nice artisanal, beautiful cafes.

00:05:23 Speaker_01
But we were hungry and greedy and we wanted more. It wasn't greedy. We weren't making enough money, really. You were young and ambitious. Thank you very much. That's a nice way of framing it. We were young and ambitious and we wanted to more.

00:05:34 Speaker_01
The only two paths to growth we could see is one is we had to get a whole lot of capital in to make our kitchen bigger.

00:05:40 Speaker_01
We ended up doing a deal with a company that represented all of the biggest producers of pastries in the world, you know, Belgium and France and so forth, the biggest industrial scale kitchens in the world for this stuff.

00:05:53 Speaker_01
And they produce it, par-bake it, freeze it. And then we would buy that, we had the exclusive rights to that range, and we would buy that, stick it in freezer shipping containers and

00:06:05 Speaker_01
ship it to the other side of the planet and sell it into the supermarkets. We were able to just take all this market share away from all these small artisan patisseries, our own one included.

00:06:16 Speaker_01
We ended up letting go of a lot of our staff because we didn't need them. And then we just took all this business from all these small scale patisseries because we could just do all the supermarkets across the whole country all in one go. Wow. Right.

00:06:29 Speaker_01
A lot of the soul came out of the business experience, but we were making a lot of money. So that offset that. It was a counter. And then I moved to New Zealand because we were in Sydney at the time.

00:06:39 Speaker_01
I moved to New Zealand with the view to expanding the business into the New Zealand market as well. And then the global financial crisis hit.

00:06:47 Speaker_02
Yes.

00:06:48 Speaker_01
And what that did is because we were paying in euros, for the food and the exchange rate spikes between the Australian dollar and the euros went haywire.

00:06:58 Speaker_01
Overnight, literally overnight, we went from making a good profit to making a big loss because our costs went up like 30% overnight. And the more we sold, the more money we'd lose. And of course, The supermarkets weren't going to budge.

00:07:14 Speaker_01
They didn't say, Oh, really? Sorry for your mate. They were like, no, you've got a contract here. You've got to fill the contract and you're going to have to find a way to fill the gap yourself.

00:07:22 Speaker_01
And that combined with the fact that our son had just been born combined with, I had just moved to Waiheke Island, which had a different worldview combined with my childhood and so forth. It just created a situation where I started to think about.

00:07:39 Speaker_01
what's the future going to look like? And am I contributing to the problem or am I part of the solution?

00:07:46 Speaker_01
And what I felt was that 2008 was the beginning of what could potentially become a series of crises of ecological or economic or social crises that we were facing.

00:08:00 Speaker_01
And food is like the most important foundational layer for being able to handle resilient and be resilient through whatever crisis we have.

00:08:09 Speaker_01
I had this idea of if what I've learned being in the food game up to now could be applied to a new kind of food system, a new kind of food model, then maybe there's a way through.

00:08:21 Speaker_01
Maybe there's a way that a new kind of blueprint could be established that could be the way that we do food. my, I tried to come up with some ideas, some names.

00:08:30 Speaker_01
My granny used to, when we went around to her house for dinner, she would say, oh, you know, the tomatoes are OOTG out of the garden and the eggs are OOTCB out of the chook's bum, you know?

00:08:42 Speaker_01
And so I was like, oh, we'll call it Oog out of our own gardens, right? And then my wife said, that's a stupid name. Call it Ooby out of our own backyards. And then I just got completely besotted with the idea.

00:08:55 Speaker_01
And I exited my company at the worst possible time. I didn't have, you know, it was a bad time to try and exit because we were in, it was in a difficult situation.

00:09:03 Speaker_01
But I was so inspired by this idea of being able to, of seeing small scale food reclaim market share.

00:09:11 Speaker_01
I could see that the way that the food system would work in the future, if it was going to flourish, would be a completely different model to the way it is now.

00:09:20 Speaker_02
I'm interested in terms of how you went from your original, OK, you were making pastries in the kitchen and then you've expanded out and then you realized that your way you really want to invest your time was in this new space with Ubi.

00:09:34 Speaker_02
So Ubi started as a middleman between farmers and consumers, but it's since evolved into a platform that empowers farmers to manage their own supply chains, which is really interesting and I imagine not an easy thing to do.

00:09:50 Speaker_02
So can you talk about the evolution and why you decided to go in that direction?

00:09:54 Speaker_01
Yeah. The direction of it being a platform where farmers and food producers can control their own supply chain, that was actually the intention from the beginning. Right. But we didn't know what that would involve.

00:10:06 Speaker_01
And so we thought, you know what we'll do? We'll create one and we'll be the hands and the feet in between the gate and the plate. And then we'll design the software for that.

00:10:17 Speaker_01
And then once we've figured it out, we can then, you know, we'll just do the software. And we figured it would take about two years.

00:10:24 Speaker_02
And then nine years later... Nine years later, you were an overnight success.

00:10:29 Speaker_01
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Nine years later, we were running our own, what you call food hubs in Auckland and in Christchurch and in Sydney.

00:10:37 Speaker_01
And they were company owned and we had our own warehouses and delivery vehicles and forklifts and cool rooms and all of that. But what we had done over those nine years is we had just been building our own software for ourselves.

00:10:51 Speaker_01
Like we were our primary user of our software, as well as the customers, the households that were buying from us. And we were consistently just improving that software and getting it to do any of the sort of administrative, recurring,

00:11:06 Speaker_01
boring, time-consuming tasks that would allow us to leverage our time. And so then finally, nine years later, was when I moved, the family and I, because my wife's actually British, we moved here to the UK.

00:11:20 Speaker_01
And that was the point at which we let the local teams have the hard businesses, like as in the actual hubs, the hardware side of the business.

00:11:28 Speaker_01
And we finally realized the idea of, okay, now we've got a software system that we can make available to other people. And it was a big risk because we were coming into a brand new market that I really didn't know anything about.

00:11:43 Speaker_01
And actually it didn't seem that there was much appetite for it until of course, when the lockdowns came and people were unable to leave their homes and the slots were filled up with the supermarket home delivery. They start looking elsewhere.

00:11:58 Speaker_01
They found their local veg box schemes or they found their local food hubs and the demands went up. And then all of a sudden we were starting to get calls in saying, Hey, that thing you were telling us about, tell me what it does again.

00:12:10 Speaker_01
And that's where the pivot started to. to get a bit of traction.

00:12:14 Speaker_02
Let's talk about the tech itself. So for our listeners then, how does the whole process work? So how does somebody go from signing up to actually getting the food from the local producers?

00:12:24 Speaker_02
And what's going on behind the scenes that I'm sure you're making look extremely simple, but it's probably extremely complex.

00:12:30 Speaker_01
So there's two ways of looking at it. It's either from a customer point of view or like a household point of view, which is what you've just referred to then. How do they go about it is,

00:12:40 Speaker_01
they will discover from one way or another that there is a local farm or a local food hub in their region, in the area that delivers to them, or that there is a pickup point not far from them.

00:12:51 Speaker_01
They go to the website, they see whoever it is, they'll see Schillingford Organics or Moss Valley Market Garden. Ubi is in the background, right? We're like more like a sort of a Shopify specifically for this type of business model.

00:13:06 Speaker_01
And the products will be displayed, they can add things to their cart. And then they go to checkout. The main point of difference is that everything is biased towards subscription.

00:13:18 Speaker_02
Right.

00:13:19 Speaker_01
So you'll add something, but you'll be like, you know, you want that every week, right? And people are like, oh, I never really thought about, but yeah, I guess I do want it every week. Right. So it's very much a subscription based model recurring.

00:13:28 Speaker_03
Yeah.

00:13:29 Speaker_01
But you can add things just once off and you can say, oh, I just wanted every second delivery and so forth. And so then you go to the checkout, you pay for your first delivery upfront.

00:13:39 Speaker_01
And then you wait and it turns up on your doorstep and you open it up and you've got the most amazing, freshest, nutritious food you could possibly imagine. And you can't believe you didn't do it before. So that's the household experience.

00:13:51 Speaker_01
And you, you also are dealing directly with the farmer or the farmer's wife or the people working on the farm and the person who delivers it to you is typically.

00:14:00 Speaker_01
has just been out in the field that morning, has loaded your box into the farm van or truck and has delivered it to your door. And so you're dealing with the people who are producing your food. Like you've got this intimate connection with them.

00:14:13 Speaker_01
But anyway, that's the household experience. Our primary customer is the farmer or the food hub or the artisan food producer. they're the ones that we focus most on.

00:14:26 Speaker_01
And for them, they hear about Ubi, typically now it's through someone else who's running on Ubi and they come to our website. they see, okay, what this does for me is number one, is it gives me an online shop, a place where I can sell my food.

00:14:41 Speaker_01
Two, it means that my customers can self-manage. They can pick and choose whatever they want.

00:14:48 Speaker_01
Three, it means the communication with the customers, a lot of the communication, whilst it's customized to me and I can write in my own language and so forth, That's largely automated.

00:14:59 Speaker_01
So I'm not having to spend all this time handling all this customer inquiries and so forth. A lot of the hubs and farms will produce a lot of the food that they sell, but they then augment their range with bread from their local bakery.

00:15:13 Speaker_01
and milk from their local dairy and eggs from the local chicken farm. And so they actually are able to provide a full farm shop range with them at the heart of it, with their food at the heart of it.

00:15:25 Speaker_01
So it'll organise the harvest list plus all the orders for the other supply that they're bringing in. It prints out all the labels to put onto the boxes. Um, it figures out the order of deliveries.

00:15:39 Speaker_01
If they're going to be home doing home delivery so that they can pack the boxes into the van, last in first out. And then they get in the, in the van, they put their phone on the cradle, they press go and they just put a podcast on. Right.

00:15:53 Speaker_01
And then they just go and do their deliveries and then job's done. And what it does is it basically, it condenses that whole administrative, sort of headspace, cognitive load down into the minimal amount of time.

00:16:06 Speaker_01
And it means that they can basically run that business of sales and supply chain or sales and distribution in a really simple manner. And it usually just one day a week.

00:16:17 Speaker_01
And what it means is that instead of selling their food at like 20p in the pound, or if they're lucky, 50p in the pound, They're selling their food at 100p in the pound, right? And yes, they've got to do a bit more work.

00:16:33 Speaker_01
They've got to pack it into boxes and they've got to deliver it. But that's an extra business sort of stacked on top of their existing enterprise. So they have their stacked enterprise and it's simplified so that it's very easy to do. Yeah.

00:16:45 Speaker_02
And I'm really starting to get a sense of why this has taken the best part of a decade to get this right. Because you obviously, you've

00:16:52 Speaker_02
been through the pain of thinking through with your suppliers, OK, what are your pain points and how do we make that simple for you? And so has this are you finding that this is really disrupting like that more traditional food supply model?

00:17:06 Speaker_02
And how scared are the retailers for these sorts of models?

00:17:09 Speaker_01
I mean, I don't think they even know we exist yet. We saw the food market is so massive. It's so vast. that we are really just tickling the edge at the moment. Um, but point is that it is really working and it works for every member of the supply chain.

00:17:27 Speaker_01
It works for the farms or food hubs that are running the hubs, what we call the hub function, which is where the food comes into, gets packed and dispatched. It works for them.

00:17:36 Speaker_01
It works for the people that they're buying off it for whatever they are buying. And because we call it a pull to market model where. the sales, you sell it first and then you only harvest or deliver to order. So there's no waste, right?

00:17:52 Speaker_01
It's really fast. So the farmers and so forth, they get heads up because it's a subscription base as well. You can tell the farmers, okay, we need this for this week, but next week we're going to need this and the week after we're going to need that.

00:18:03 Speaker_01
So it provides stability. It provides predictability and stability. But the other thing is that when you're harvesting to order,

00:18:10 Speaker_01
In some cases, it's literally a, a lettuce will be harvested in the morning and on your doorstep that afternoon, because why harvest it earlier? Just harvest it at the latest possible time.

00:18:20 Speaker_01
Cause then, you know, so it's just like, it's just a very fast, which means it's nutritionally as high nutrition as you can possibly get. And no packaging is required. You don't need plastic. You don't need packaging.

00:18:33 Speaker_01
So it works on so many levels and it just means that there is so much more margin in the retail price for the fewer hands that it goes through on the way from the gate to the plate.

00:18:46 Speaker_02
And I kind of listened to you and I'm sitting there thinking, this just makes so much sense. Why hasn't this happened before? Why isn't it happening more now?

00:18:57 Speaker_02
I mean, if everyone benefits and it feels like what you're saying is the system itself is also benefiting, why has this been...

00:19:06 Speaker_01
Isn't it more prevalent? I think there's a few reasons. Food isn't like anything else that you buy. You know, you buy some shoes from time to time, you buy makeup from time to time. But food, you've got to, it's so habitual.

00:19:19 Speaker_01
It's almost a different part of the brain that does food shopping than any other shopping because it's so recurring. So it's very hard to break habits. It's very hard to break a norm.

00:19:29 Speaker_01
You will change, occasionally you'll change your mind on what hairdresser you're going to go to, but very rarely you're going to change your mind about where you're going to do food shopping because it's just cognitively too heavy.

00:19:38 Speaker_01
But secondly, it comes back to price and convenience when it comes to buying a pair of shoes is sort of important, but when it's food, it's really important.

00:19:50 Speaker_01
Up until recently, small scale producers just couldn't compete on price because economies of scale were so powerful that small scale food was seen as boutique. Going to the farmer's market was seen as boutique. And it wasn't convenient.

00:20:04 Speaker_01
You had to get up at 7am on a Saturday morning, your kids are going, oh, I need to go to football and you've got this and that. And so you'd only get along every now and then. And so it was a treat. And the third pillar that I see is awareness.

00:20:16 Speaker_01
So price, convenience and awareness. People have got to know that it exists. Like supermarkets, people know they exist because there's a massive big store in the middle of town.

00:20:24 Speaker_01
They've got all these promotion campaigns, advertising and so forth, and you can't miss it. Whereas these small producers, they've got no budget and they're usually stuck on some rural lane. we'd never, we'd never know they existed.

00:20:36 Speaker_01
So it's about how can we compete on price, convenience, and awareness. And that is why it's taken so long to work, even though it is working now. So just like COVID was a real catalyst, the food inflation that we're seeing now is a real catalyst.

00:20:54 Speaker_01
And the reason food is inflate, food prices are inflating more than generally, is because of all the layers between the gate and the plate, and each one is affected by inflation in general, and so each layer has a compounding effect on the end price.

00:21:11 Speaker_01
Whereas when you're buying it direct from the local grower, there's not that many layers and the cost structure in that model isn't as affected by inflation as in the other models where there's more transport, more fuel, more electricity, storage, wages and all of that.

00:21:31 Speaker_01
So there's a lot of those things that just aren't in the calculation. And so now, if you're aware of it, you get way better value for money buying from a local farm or food hub than you would from the supermarket.

00:21:44 Speaker_01
But you wouldn't know it because Lidl's advertisements are saying we're the best value for money. They were two, three years ago, but they're not anymore, but no one knows. And then the final one is around convenience.

00:21:57 Speaker_01
And the ultimate convenience these days is you pull your phone out. you do a bit of shopping, you press go and it's on your doorstep. Now, the small scale farmers have got that up in their pocket.

00:22:07 Speaker_01
And so I think that the last thing that is really needed now for this thing to hit a tipping point is about awareness.

00:22:15 Speaker_02
You mentioned there about connections, bringing in other suppliers and improving choice. I'm assuming that kind of community model is super important to you.

00:22:27 Speaker_02
And so how do you see small scale, ecologically sound food production being essential to the health of a local economy? Is it underpinning everything?

00:22:37 Speaker_01
Yeah, it is. It's an interesting one.

00:22:39 Speaker_01
We've had debates and people have actually said to me, oh, you're actually contributing to the breakdown of the community because you're bringing technology into the place where normally there's face to face communication.

00:22:50 Speaker_01
And I've thought deeply about it and If you want community, you need to have time for high-touch relationships, right? What the technology does is it doesn't remove the relationship component.

00:23:02 Speaker_01
It removes all of the boring administrative components, which gives people more headspace and more capacity to be able to engage with the community.

00:23:11 Speaker_01
All the interactions that are happening as a result of this business model kind of being deployed into a certain region are farms are now starting to trade with other local farms.

00:23:22 Speaker_01
And real farms are getting in a real lorry and driving over to another real farm. And that wasn't happening before? Well, it wasn't happening to the same degree because they weren't able to sell it as much.

00:23:30 Speaker_01
And then you as a farmer or you as a food hub operator or people you've employed are then getting in and going out and knocking on doors. You can't deliver the food via an email.

00:23:42 Speaker_01
It has to have a real person turn up, pull up to the driveway, knock on the door and say, Oh, hi. Oh, that's great. Thanks. And there's interactions that are happening that would not otherwise have happened.

00:23:53 Speaker_01
So it actually, the effect is that it starts to breed new connections. They're not levels of abstraction. They're direct.

00:24:02 Speaker_02
Yeah. Yeah. Cause I was going to ask you the question about how you balance the technology with the goal of fostering strong local communities and economies. But basically your view is that actually it complements.

00:24:13 Speaker_01
It complements and enhances. One of the things we've got to be mindful of and I think we have to be careful of is Farmer's markets are the best.

00:24:22 Speaker_01
And what we could inadvertently do is become so good at what we do that you don't need the farmer's market anymore. And that's actually something we've got to be very conscious of not doing.

00:24:33 Speaker_01
It's one thing to have someone turn up at your doorstep, but they could end up being just another delivery driver. It's another thing to actually go and mill in a local town square or something like that and just be part of that vibe.

00:24:45 Speaker_01
And so I think it's a really important that it's not just, it's built into the technology. to facilitate the farmer's markets as well.

00:24:52 Speaker_01
And to be able to make it so that, oh, I get my midweek delivery to my door, but I've got reasons and incentives to turn up to my farmer's markets on a Saturday. And maybe the platform is a way that incentivizes me to do that.

00:25:06 Speaker_02
And let's try and bring this to life for our listeners a bit. So can you share a success story of a small scale farmer who's really benefited from the Ubi platform?

00:25:15 Speaker_01
Yeah. One of the great things about Ubi is that it's not a cookie cutter situation. Every different farmer or food hub is their own autonomous operation that do things their own way. But what that means is there's different models.

00:25:30 Speaker_01
So I'll give you three examples. So one of them, it would be Martin Bradshaw from Moss Valley Market in Sheffield.

00:25:38 Speaker_01
So he's got an acre and a half or two acres of land where he's got an amazing market garden, polytunnel, and he's got a team of two or three of them. Sometimes others will come and help out. And he came onto the platform about four years ago.

00:25:54 Speaker_01
And what it's meant for him is he's able to look after about 200 customers, between 150 and 200 customers with a very small team of people. And he's able to pay a good wage, a good living for the people he works with and for himself.

00:26:09 Speaker_01
And he's able to basically hit that sweet spot where he's not having to work so hard in order to make the money he's making, and he's got what we would call a very sustainable business model, right?

00:26:20 Speaker_01
Where his day-to-day work is get up, go to the farm, hang out with his friends at the farm, and they don't have to work too hard, but they're getting good money. Sounds idyllic. It is idyllic. It is idyllic. And before that,

00:26:33 Speaker_01
The time taken up with managing the customer orders and then dealing with customers that say, Oh, I can't eat artichoke. And can you swap this out for that? And I'm going on holidays and can you, can I not have a box that week?

00:26:45 Speaker_01
But all of those things were just overwhelming. So it's taken one example with Moss Valley, it's taken a model that was working, but it was really hard work to it works and it's a whole lot easier.

00:26:59 Speaker_04
I love that.

00:27:00 Speaker_01
The next example is Soul Farm, and they're down in Falmouth in Cornwall, and they're like a community farm, and Lawrence is heading that one up. When they came onto the platform, they had, I don't know, 30, 40 customers or something like that.

00:27:16 Speaker_01
And for them, what Ubi's done is allow them to grow, right? So it's meant that they have got the ability to be able to go out to more customers.

00:27:25 Speaker_01
The customers come onto their website, they sign up really easily, and the whole experience is really nice. But it means that they've been able to actually grow three or four times what they were before. Really?

00:27:36 Speaker_01
So it all depends on what people are looking for. Martin from Australia, he doesn't want to grow.

00:27:39 Speaker_02
He's happy with.

00:27:40 Speaker_01
In fact, what he does is he says, you no longer, there's no slots available anymore. We've got to get on a waiting list. And if someone leaves, then they can get in, but no one leaves. I guess he's creating a sense of urgency as well, right?

00:27:54 Speaker_01
So you've got his situation where he's like, I've hit my sweets, but you've got SoulFarm is like, no, we've hired some more people. We want to grow. And so it's helping them grow. And then the third one is Hampshire VegBox. and Hampshire Farm.

00:28:06 Speaker_01
So what's really fascinating about this, it was started by Seb, who now is on the team with us, heading up growth. But it was started by Seb because when he was doing market research for us back in 2019, he was like, there's something in this.

00:28:21 Speaker_01
I'm going to start my own hub in Winchester. And so he started with an empty room in a little industrial unit. And first he went around and he connected with a bunch of local farmers, found out what was available.

00:28:36 Speaker_01
Then he set himself up on Ubi and then he started canvassing letterbox drops and so forth and started getting customers in. And he said, as soon as I've got 50 customers, we'll do our first delivery.

00:28:48 Speaker_01
So he was able to effectively start his first day of business with 50 customers. Amazing. Right. And started buying from those local farms. And then, of course, what's happened over time is he's built that up.

00:29:04 Speaker_01
He's got other business partners in and then they've realized, wow, we can now start our own farm because the demand is there. And there are certain crops that we want to be able to produce ourselves. And so now they've created their own farm.

00:29:21 Speaker_01
They've gone and hired at least a field. and puts polytunnels in and then now they're growing their own food. They're still buying from their other suppliers, but they're starting it. So it's actually catalyzed a new small-scale farm in that region.

00:29:36 Speaker_02
That's amazing. So you're actually, you know, that stat at the start about a hundred thousand small-scale farms have collapsed. Actually, this model is actually generating new small-scale farms off the back of it. Amazing. I love that.

00:29:48 Speaker_02
I mean, it all sounds super successful, Pete, but as with all of these things, I'm sure that you have had mega challenges along the way. And in some ways, that's kind of where we learn the most. So I guess there's two questions in there.

00:29:59 Speaker_02
So it's what are the main challenges that you've come across that you've overcome? And yeah, with the perspective that you now have, are you positive about where this is going next?

00:30:10 Speaker_01
Yeah, like I said, the first nine years, were super challenging. The first couple of years were just super exciting and it was just enthusiasm. There's more enthusiasm than problems. And so we just overcome anything because who cares?

00:30:27 Speaker_01
I don't need to sleep. Yeah, that's it. But year three through to year nine was just like a constant near death experience. It was awful. That's year three to nine.

00:30:39 Speaker_02
So you went six years of just grinding.

00:30:42 Speaker_01
Of just absolute grinding and never knowing, never really having more than three months worth of runway.

00:30:48 Speaker_03
Wow.

00:30:48 Speaker_01
Um, number one, it forced me to learn fast, you know, and to learn, I was constantly having to adjust my perception of things, adjust my, my, my map to the reality.

00:31:01 Speaker_01
It meant that we had to focus, we had to say no to so many things and had to really narrow our focus down to saying, Oh, what's the most important thing? and only do that.

00:31:12 Speaker_01
And two, the other thing is we did try a lot of different things to try to make our product and our offering more relevant, but the market just wasn't hungry for it.

00:31:23 Speaker_01
And so we had to just work double hard in order to appeal to that small niche of customers that were there. So we were really forced to get creative around how we got our messaging, how we needed to relate to our suppliers.

00:31:37 Speaker_01
So our suppliers were small farms and sometimes we were late on our payments. Right. And those situations, like I'm actually part of the problem for these farmers. If I can't pay them on time.

00:31:48 Speaker_01
So having to build a relationship with them, now that did not happen often, but when it did, it was really stressful. And so I had to understand their situation and go out and meet with them.

00:31:57 Speaker_01
And so it was just a deep immersion into the space and a lot of constant pressure.

00:32:02 Speaker_02
You've mentioned focus a number of times. It sounds from what you're saying, it's like a focus on just doing the one thing that you really knew that you had to do.

00:32:12 Speaker_02
The focus on the area and really understanding the connections and establishing those personal relationships and the focus on that kind of core software, which would then allow you to step back and do more.

00:32:26 Speaker_01
Leverage. Leverage. It's a leverage thing. Exactly. Obviously, we take only a fraction of the value of the transaction. Normally a wholesaler will take anywhere from 15 to 30% of a trade, right?

00:32:40 Speaker_01
With Ubi, we fulfill a lot of the functions of a wholesaler, but we take 1.9%. Amazing. Right? And that is truly disruptive. Right. But the great thing is I'm not in the trucks and I'm not having to do that.

00:32:54 Speaker_01
So we're offering some real value that we can leverage. All right. So that's the key to it. But we couldn't have got

00:33:00 Speaker_01
to the point where our software was that applicable and that relevant without having been through those years of actually being the feet on the ground and doing all of the actual work. There's no school to learn that.

00:33:12 Speaker_01
You just got to throw yourself in and you learn by osmosis. And then when we're now, when we're talking to farms and food hubs about the system, we understand the reality. And so it is very quick.

00:33:26 Speaker_01
80% of the people who look at the software sign up to the software, which is incredibly high. But I think it's got a lot to do with farms and food hubs that is.

00:33:36 Speaker_01
I think it's got a lot to do with the fact that it's so perfectly matched to their business model. It's not about taking- Built it for them.

00:33:43 Speaker_01
It's not about taking Shopify or something like that and then trying to hack it and twist it to do what they want. It's like purpose built.

00:33:49 Speaker_04
Yeah.

00:33:50 Speaker_02
And Pete, looking ahead, it seems to me that you are fixing a really important part of what has been a broken system. What changes do you personally want to see in the global food system?

00:34:02 Speaker_02
And how do you see Ubi contributing to that change, a truly transformative change?

00:34:08 Speaker_01
Yeah. Big question. I mean, there's a lot to it. Like, firstly, I think that one of the biggest problems we've got in food is a concentration of power in too few hands, and therefore a lot of exploitation at both ends, at the gate and at the plate end.

00:34:26 Speaker_01
So I think decentralizing is a huge part of a better food system. Yep. Decorporatizing, right, is a huge part.

00:34:35 Speaker_01
There's so many benefits to a centralized and corporatized marketplace for so many things, like we wouldn't be able to have an iPhone without that. Right.

00:34:44 Speaker_01
Most products that we get, we couldn't have had if we didn't have centralized and corporatized models to deliver them. But food doesn't need to be that way. Food grows, you put a little thing in the ground and it pops out of the fucking ground. Right.

00:35:02 Speaker_01
And that's the best food.

00:35:03 Speaker_03
Yeah.

00:35:03 Speaker_01
It's a, when you put all that mass processing and all that through, it actually diminishes the food. It makes it worse. Food is a different beast. And the best food comes from decentralized, direct, not packaged.

00:35:20 Speaker_01
not stored in a double and triple handled and not frozen. So you get the, it's just the best food when you're able to cut all of the intermediaries out of the system.

00:35:32 Speaker_01
And look, we needed this food system coming out of the, out of World War II with this big boost in production and this big boost in population. And I think it was a necessary experience for us as a society to go through.

00:35:46 Speaker_01
But I just think it's sunsetting now. We don't, we're seeing the diet related illnesses that are coming from it. We're seeing the disconnection that's coming from it. Kids just don't really know what food is.

00:35:55 Speaker_01
They, it always blows my mind to hear that there are some kids that really don't understand that this thing came off a tree or came out of the dirt. Yeah. I guess we've got to take it back to basics, right? Yeah.

00:36:06 Speaker_01
And I think we're hungry for back to basics. I think the, you know, the, we've been doing, like agriculture for 10,000 years, right? Thereabouts. Okay.

00:36:14 Speaker_01
So we've moved out of the hunter gatherer thing and we've been doing agriculture for 10,000 years and we've been producing our own food and it's always been local. It's always been in harmony with nature.

00:36:23 Speaker_01
It's only the last sort of 60 to 80 years that we've come off that, that path that has proven itself for 10,000 years, where we've diverged from that. I think we get, there's a correction needs to happen. You can diverge to a degree and that's great.

00:36:38 Speaker_01
Cause that's how you, that's how you innovate, right? That's how you find things. But there's a point at which you're like, you've innovated past the purpose of what this thing's there for. Food is not. for making money.

00:36:51 Speaker_01
Producing and selling food is not about making money. It's about nourishing people. It's about survival of humanity, right? It's yeah, you can make money doing it and you have to be able to make money doing it.

00:37:01 Speaker_01
And you've got to be able to have a decent living. But the primary thing is you've got to, you've got to make sure that what you're feeding is going to survive generation after generation.

00:37:10 Speaker_01
When something's not working to that degree, you just got to come up with a way to make it work. And I think this is, And we're not the only ones doing this, by the way.

00:37:17 Speaker_01
I mean, there's a lot of activity going on around the world, a lot of organizations and movements and so forth that have really have been working on this forever.

00:37:27 Speaker_01
But now there's more of a movement of people, there's more of a people kind of waking up.

00:37:31 Speaker_02
Long may that continue. And I love the positivity. And actually, when you put it like that, the 10,000 years has been working in the 60 years is where we're starting to veer off course. Actually, I take a lot of

00:37:42 Speaker_02
heart from that, because what that suggests to me is that we've got time to recorrect all of this, which I think is super positive. Pete, thank you for all of this amazing insight.

00:37:51 Speaker_02
And sometimes on the show, we ask guests, what would you do if I had a magic wand or the food system had a magic wand and you could change something?

00:38:01 Speaker_02
From all the experience, the hard work that you've put in, you must have seen so many challenges, so many things which could be better. If I could wave that wand, what would you love to see change in the food system?

00:38:17 Speaker_01
I think awareness.

00:38:19 Speaker_01
It would be awareness of that there is now a way for you to be able to get your food in a far more appropriate way, in a way that's fairer for everyone involved in the supply and delivery of that food, in a way that's fresher, more nutritional, in a way that builds regional and local economies.

00:38:44 Speaker_01
in a way that avoids and doesn't require all the packaging and the silly merchandising and all of that, but in a way that's as convenient or even possibly more convenient and that the price is as good or even better.

00:39:00 Speaker_01
That awareness is probably the thing. I think most people, if they were aware that you can have this tomato

00:39:09 Speaker_01
which was picked when it was green and it was bred in order to be able to survive a supply chain, which yes, it's a tomato and yeah, you can taste tomato a bit. A bit.

00:39:21 Speaker_01
Versus this tomato, which was picked when it was meant to be picked, when it was dropped off the vine and when you just sprinkle a little bit of salt on it, it just blows your taste buds out of the water.

00:39:31 Speaker_01
The good tomato is going to get delivered to your door at a better price. Most people will go, I'll go for that. I would think that's an easy decision. It's an easy, but they don't know.

00:39:41 Speaker_01
They don't know that it's an option, but if they're, if people do know about it and are aware of it, and they're looking for their local farm or their local food hub, I think that will be the biggest driver. That'll mean that.

00:39:55 Speaker_01
more farms will start up, more local small scale farms will start up, more local small scale artisan craft bakers and cheesemakers will actually be able to start.

00:40:05 Speaker_01
The ones that are already there will actually start to really flourish and they won't be spending all their time trying to get their product onto a shelf

00:40:15 Speaker_01
at Sainsbury's or Tesco's and giving all these free samples and then taking ridiculously low prices and then end up getting told, oh, thanks, but it didn't really work and see you later.

00:40:26 Speaker_01
They're actually able to deal direct and they get to get good margins and they get to represent themselves. Like we've got at the moment, like we started four years ago, just over four years ago, there was nothing on Ubi in the UK.

00:40:38 Speaker_01
Now there's over a hundred farms and food hubs that are buying in from over a thousand different producers. And there's over 13,000 households that are getting deliveries every week.

00:40:52 Speaker_01
There's 10 million pounds worth of sales is happening on the platform. So it's driving real value to all of these producers. It's very early.

00:41:04 Speaker_01
But if you throw a dose of awareness onto that and create more demand and there's more demand for it, then these guys are going to flourish and new more of these artisans, food producers and so forth that will have a space, a way to get into business and make a decent living.

00:41:19 Speaker_01
I love it.

00:41:20 Speaker_02
It doesn't sound like an unrealistic vision to me. If waving the magic wand, it feels like that's not that far away, which is actually really encouraging. And Pete, you spoke about the scale that you've had in the last four years.

00:41:32 Speaker_02
So what's next for Ubi? Are we looking world domination at a community scale?

00:41:37 Speaker_01
At a community scale. We're looking, it's funny, people say, does this thing scale? Will this scale? It's like, no, we don't scale. We replicate. There's no borders to Ubi. It's already happening in Australia and New Zealand.

00:41:47 Speaker_01
And the UK is where most of it's happening at the moment. But there's hubs popping up in the US. There's hubs popping up in Norway and in Poland and in Canada.

00:41:57 Speaker_01
The system works largely anywhere, and we just let whoever wants to get going wherever they are.

00:42:04 Speaker_01
One just point that I think is really important here is that the more of these small-scale independent businesses that run on the platform, the more the platform becomes a dependency. I mean, we're really aware of that. There's a term

00:42:23 Speaker_01
called inshittification. I don't know if it was, it was, it was the word of the year for 2023, I think it was. Google it.

00:42:30 Speaker_01
But anyway, basically what it talks about is whenever a platform gains dominance, it goes through this process of first thing that's important to them, to the platform are the users of the platform.

00:42:41 Speaker_01
And everything is there to make sure the users are happy because they need to build the user base, right? To get the Metcastle, the network effect. And then the next thing as it goes on, now it shifts to the advertisers are the most important people.

00:42:57 Speaker_01
The users become the product. and the advertisers become the customer. And then once they've really nailed that in, then it's the shareholders that actually become the most important. And that's the smallest group out of all of them.

00:43:09 Speaker_01
So it goes from serving the biggest group, like the most, to a smaller group of advertisers, to a smaller group of shareholders. And so it's a process of concentration of power.

00:43:21 Speaker_02
So the natural next question, which I'm assuming you're about to answer, is how do you protect a platform like Ubi from going through that process?

00:43:29 Speaker_01
By creating an ownership model, what's called a steward ownership model, which prevents it from, for number one, prevents it from ever being sold out. And number two, that it creates a user ownership.

00:43:42 Speaker_01
There's a user ownership scheme where the users of the platform gain an ownership stake in the platform. and they gain a voice and rewards from the success of the platform.

00:43:55 Speaker_01
And that we build into the articles of association that this will never be sold, like Amazon can never buy it. And that any investors that come in are very welcome. We always need to be able to grow our team in order to be able to expand.

00:44:09 Speaker_01
They're very welcome to come in, but there's a structured exit for them where it doesn't risk the platform being taken over by investors that want to then steer it down a different path to maximize profits. Love it.

00:44:23 Speaker_01
You know, I've grown up and having seen the effects of sort of casino capitalism, that We all leave a legacy behind us, whether we like it or not. And we all want to learn from the mistakes that we either do or that we see other people do.

00:44:40 Speaker_01
And that as long as we're not sacrificing too much for making something that's going to be able to last and it's going to be high quality and so on, then the satisfaction is actually in building something that's really high quality.

00:44:58 Speaker_01
that's got real deep integrity to it. It's like a craftsman building a table. They're not really thinking of the end customer.

00:45:07 Speaker_01
They're more thinking about, this is an expression of me, and I'm going to put all this attention to detail on the underside of the table no one's ever going to look at because I feel good about it.

00:45:18 Speaker_02
So Pete, this has been an amazing discussion. I've really thoroughly enjoyed it. And I think the Ubi story is super inspiring.

00:45:26 Speaker_02
So for those listeners out there who really want to get be part of the movement, get involved, what's the best way for them to do that? How can they contact you and the Ubi team?

00:45:36 Speaker_01
It's Ubi.com. So Ubi is four O's. It stands for out of our own backyards. And it's all about us looking after ourselves from our own, with our own resources out of our own backyard. So fourrowsby.com, you'll find this.

00:45:56 Speaker_01
The website is probably going to give you the most clear sort of snapshot of what we're doing and how we're doing it. And the site is amazing. I love it. And then from there, there'll be links to the socials.

00:46:08 Speaker_01
You know, I think it's UBHQ on Instagram and on Facebook and things like that. But yeah, the website I think is the first place to go.

00:46:16 Speaker_01
And on that page, on the website, there's a community link, which takes you to a page with all of the farms and food hubs that are running on Ubi. So you can, you can look through that and see is, is there a delivery?

00:46:29 Speaker_01
Is there one that will deliver to my home? Or if you are. chomping at the bit to get going with your own small farm and so forth, then we can give you a demo. We can show you how the system works.

00:46:40 Speaker_01
And there's a lot that are coming on as startups from scratch. There's a lot that have been going and they're just, and they want to grow up. And there's a, there's a, there's a lot that have a good large size enterprises that are using the system.

00:46:52 Speaker_01
So we'll have a conversation and see what fits.

00:46:55 Speaker_02
Amazing. And I'm sure there's loads of listeners out there who are now itching to get onto that, whether or not to take the produce or actually just to get started themselves. So, Pete, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been a joy.

00:47:05 Speaker_02
Matt, it's been a real pleasure. Thank you. So that was Pete Russell from Ubi on the show and another great insightful episode. Some key takeaways for me, I think Pete's story was really fascinating.

00:47:21 Speaker_02
I think the fact that he was able to identify that actually what he was doing prior to Ubi was part of the problem in the system. And actually he knew that he could course correct and he could be part of the solution.

00:47:36 Speaker_02
And I think that showed real bravery and courage to do that. I think Pete also showed that he was fixing a system which kind of just makes sense.

00:47:48 Speaker_02
He's compressing the supply chain and as a result, everybody benefits from farm to consumer with better, fresher,

00:47:56 Speaker_02
Food suppliers benefit and actually, you know, if everybody makes more decent equitable money Basically, it it seems like an obvious thing to do but the software that he's been able to implement has obviously taken such a long time So kudos to him for that

00:48:13 Speaker_02
Pete also spoke about the impact on communities, which is obviously very important to him.

00:48:18 Speaker_02
And it's platforms like Ubi that are actually bringing communities back together and not just providing really great opportunities again, but are also helping reverse the decline we're seeing in some small scale farmers, which can only be applauded.

00:48:33 Speaker_02
And then the final thing that I took away from Pete, which he was talking about the end of the show, Pete was saying that we've been doing this well for 10,000 years, and there was a really good purpose to how we were farming previously.

00:48:45 Speaker_02
But actually, it's only in the last 60 years when we've been blown off course. But Pete had real

00:48:51 Speaker_02
positivity and optimism that actually as humans, we're able to course correct and through innovation and just, you know, sheer commitment, we can actually bring ourselves back.

00:49:02 Speaker_02
So I think it was a really positive message that Pete left us with in that show. And I hope that everybody enjoyed listening and is going to be going straight onto the Ubi platform to sign up. Thank you everybody for listening in.

00:49:17 Speaker_02
This has been the Food Fight podcast. If you'd like to find out more, head over to the EIT Food website at www.eitfood.eu. And also please join the conversation via hashtag EIT Food Fight on our X channel at EIT Food.

00:49:33 Speaker_02
And of course, if you haven't already, please make sure that you sign up to the show so you never miss an episode. Thanks again.