Pete Russell

Thank you for having me, James.

It's a pleasure to be here.

OOBY, it's spelled with four O's, B-Y, so it stands for Out of Our Own Backyards.

Its purpose is to help to put small scale back at the heart of the food system.

We set OOBY up as an online platform.

for small-scale producers to be able to represent themselves online and to be able to connect with their local communities and own their own supply chain from their gate to the customer's plate.

And it started out as an idea back in 2008.

when we had the global financial crisis and you probably, I don't know if you remember what the type of mood there was around the GFC, but there was a lot of fear of like, wow, our whole society is balancing on this fragile economic model and food itself is at risk of the supply chains being disrupted because money,

was not moving because exchange rates were spiking and so on.

So that was the catalyst of it.

And so it's really been an endeavor to try to find a way to bring food back to a resilient state.

If you think we've been eating

food from sort of an agricultural model for 10,000 years.

And so it's been resilient for a long time.

It's got a good Lindy effect.

But just in the last 80 years, which is less than 1% of that timeframe, we've completely changed the food system and we've centralized it massively.

And that has come with challenges and with implications that I don't think we've really considered deeply enough.

So Ubi is all about considering that and coming up with ways of sort of re-decentralizing our food systems to make them more fair, to make them more socially, ecologically sound, and to make them more resilient again.

right well you'll find if you go to ubi.com you'll find a website where we are promoting our software to farmers and to sort of small scale for producers where they can then create a shop online so we are like a shopify

for small scale artisan, ecologically sound food producers.