We’ve had another good year of growth at Ooooby. The number of UK food hubs have more than doubled from 20 to 42 since this time last year and platform sales in the UK have also doubled from £200k/mth to over £400k/mth.
The network for farms and food hubs is spreading to all parts of the UK and the first hub in Ireland has recently come on board.
Why is it working?
There are a lot of contributing factors including a dedicated team with decades of experience and good old fashioned ‘timing’. But mostly I think it comes down to matching a solid solution with a growing problem.
Key Developments
UK hub rollout. We now support a total of 42 hubs in the UK, and there are 17 more hubs in the process of onboarding due to be live in Q1 of 2023.
Investment. We successfully secured funding for Ooooby UK earlier this year via a loan from a number of impact investors including A Team Foundation, Be The Earth Foundation and Atreyu. The loan is on favourable terms and is providing the resources needed to continue to grow ahead of another fundraising round early next year.
Growing our team. We have recently hired new team members for both business development and tech development. We are now a team of 7 seasoned professionals with complementary skill sets with solid and sensible plans for continued growth.
Coming Up
Our plan going forward is to extend on our existing software to enable independent retailers to use the platform for selling local food online and to will build a B2B supplier module that will enable thousands of food producers to sell to and through the hubs and retailers on the platform.
We are also progressing with the Food Data Collaboration project which will allow inter-operations with various short supply chain systems.
Excitingly, we are also planning to implement our steward / user ownership model in 2023 which will give the farmers and food hubs a stake in the platform.
The Long Game
We’re playing the long game and we wouldn’t be here today without the backing of lots of good people who want to see a better food system for generations to come. Thank you to all the good people who have chipped in along the way to help realise a vision for a fair, fast and free food system.
