The global Open Food Network Community has always worked totally remotely, ever since we began in 2015. In 2017 we realised that our community would benefit from spending time together in person, connecting with our hearts as well as our heads. Since then the global community has come together in person once a year to connect, dream and vision our future food systems together. Every year we’ve felt a pang of guilt at the flights that some in the community must take (most try to travel by train) to bring us together. We’ve had difficult conversations trying to weigh up the importance of face to face connections in the context of our global climate crisis. 

And then 2020 came along. This year we don’t have the option to meet face to face, so we are hosting our annual global gathering online. While we’ll miss the opportunity to hug, we’re excited that this means that our global gathering can be more inclusive than ever! 

2020 has been a year of rapid growth for the global Open Food Network. Globally, we’ve facilitated many millions of Euros in sales of local food through our platform. We’ve supported tens of thousands of local food producers and community food enterprises throughout the pandemics global lock downs. We’ve launched new instances of the platform in a dozen new countries including Brazil, Burkina Faso, Jordan, Turkey, India and more. We’ve been a backbone of the local food economies all over the world. 

It is joyous that we are now able to come together online for two weeks to celebrate, dream and envision how we can help drive this movement that helps good food get to good people all over the world!

Our Global Gathering will take place from September 28th to October 9th.
Many of the sessions will be open for anyone around the world to attend, and we’d love to invite you to join us!

Public Agenda

Find joining details for all the sessions here