Local Food Nodes

Local Food Nodes connects local food producers to local food customers to empower first hand relations over food and enables direct transactions, resilient communities and regained control over what we eat and how it is produced. A desire to make food local again.

Some background

It all started for me when two friends in the village I live started talking about building a digital solution for trade with local produce. One of them, Albin, had just finished a pilot study to find the needs of small-scale producers and saw a huge need for a solution that was more local and not a greedy middleman. Viktor had some great ideas about the financial aspects of the platform, using volontary donations instead of a fixed membership fee or taking a cut of sales. It all sounded awesome and since I was looking for something to make programming a bit more meaningful I joined up and started coding.

The first summer, before I joined, a temporary WordPress site had been created just to test the concept of a platform. It was really bad and not build for the purpose, so when I started prototyping the platform the bar was set really low. We just needed something where you could create accounts, locations, producers and products. And orders of course, but we didn't even handle payments (since the whole idea was to have producers and customers to meet and exchange products and money directly). Pretty easy stuff. Then people started using it. Lot's of people signed up, and with users you get requests and the list of requested features grew. We did some minor improvements on the first version but realized quickly that a major rewrite was needed. Version 2 was started within a year or so and contained a new design with improved UX and some simplification of features. As of 2022 version 3 is under development that will simplify things even more and also add flexibility to meet up with producer and customer needs.

Tech

Local Food Nodes is build using Laravel. It's CRUD. There are a few API's: one for the frontend, one for the mobile app (that's currently unavailable) and ...

For the frontend there are quite a few Vue components. JS is only used when needed, for features where UX is most important like product lists and the checkout. For everything else it's just blade templates, usually with a form.

The search is using Elastic Search running on Elastic Cloud. There's a small API statistics running on nodejs

localfoodnodes.org