Warsaw Food Cooperative is an informal group of consumers, which got together to satisfy (some of) their needs through direct contact with producers.
The idea is very simple: members of Cooperative get together to buy directly from local food producers or on the wholesale food market. Because we buy directly, we avoid the middlemen and by doing this we gain better control of quality of purchased goods. Members of Cooperative work rotationally and without any gratification, and because of this our operation costs are close to “0”. Buying food is important, but it’s not our only activity. We’ve created a fund spent on members’ Social Fund, Discussion Club, variety of workshops and other social activities.
We believe that it is in our best interest to create close relationships with suppliers, based on mutual respect, dialog and fair trade rules. In our activities we try to reach goals of cooperative movement, developing democratic, full open, horizontal, and transparent organization.
Currently our Cooperative has 30 – 40 active members, who participate in cooperative purchases organized every two weeks. From the beginning we support establishing new cooperatives because our goal is to expand democratic control over chains of production, distribution and trade itself.
We discovered that main problem is lack of IT based, flexible Purchase System that could be used by already established and future cooperatives in Poland and around the globe.
We welcome everybody to join our team to create of intuitive, configurable ordering system that could be used to change the face of global trade.
- we’ve mapped the whole process of purchase as it is now to learn how it’s organized, and what can be improved, and how,
- we created map of purchase system, with views for suppliers, cooperative members, admin,
- we built working prototype of system with interface for cooperative members and suppliers.