Reforming the food industry with a Linky brand

Reforming the food industry with a Linky brand

Copy of story posted on Medium

Even before I was at all involved in the Food/grocery industry, it sounded fucked and in need of major reform. Everything from monopolies, food waste, mistreatment of animals, misleading advertising, excess packaging, supply chain inefficiencies, pricing madness, lack of nutritional education, impact on climate, agricultural abuse and economic inequality to name a few that always appeared to be accepted as the norm without even requiring any serious digging.

Partially as a result of some of these and partially due to personal health reasons, over the last 7 years or so, I’ve gradually gotten closer to this industry and everything I assumed to be true (as far as I can see) has been confirm ed and usually is much worse than I could’ve ever imagined. While some things such as reducing food waste (some examples here and here) and most recently ‘plastic’ have started to receive some mainstream attention, on the whole it seems that there is still a very long way to go.

Is there a solution? So without getting into a long personal story, I have created a range of products (snack foods) that I believe could help to drive change in many of these areas.

The products are 100% natural (using only fruits, vegetables, nuts and spices), unique in the market, can be made using farm surplus, have a long shelf life, plastic free packaging, are simple and fairly inexpensive to produce and can be incorporated into classroom education. While it is of course entirely subjective, but they also taste good and have tested incredibly well with a wide range of consumers (from toddlers to office workers and anyone else looking for a sweet, crunchy snack).

While this all probably sounds ‘too good to be true’ and a crazy dream, it is to an extent — I’m a Linkybrain so this shouldn’t be a surprise. The challenge is finding the team and the resources to deliver this in the market at scale. I know that if I try to ‘own’ this personally, then it will never happen as it’s not a one person job and I know that my Linkybrain doesn’t have the capacity or the desire to do it on my own.

This is where the Linkybrains come in. Over the past couple of months observing the creation of this exciting community/network, my feeling was that a common project for people to get behind would be a great way of strengthening bonds, sorting out the do’ers from the passengers and creating an amazing story demonstrating the power of what we can achieve when we work openly and collaboratively. A project that seeks to address a number of the Global Goals, seems to be the perfect fit.

Do I personally care about ownership, profits, recognition? In a word ‘No’, I care about making a positive difference in the world.

It’s not my area of expertise so I’m sure many will laugh at my naivety but I envisage some sort of Gross Revenue Share model where a portion is retained by the business for operations/marketing, a portion goes to the Linkybrain Collective(??) to help fund other projects and all individuals involved receive their share based on an agreed contribution level.

What do Linkys think — can Linkybrains be game changers in the food/grocery sector?