James Reed: all about business
62. How to stack revenue: The 3 levers that grow any food local business | Pete Russell
19 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: Who is Pete Russell and what is his vision for local food systems?
Welcome to All About Business with me, James Reid, the podcast that covers everything about business, management, and leadership. Every episode, I sit down with different guests who have bootstrapped companies, masterminded investment models, or built a business empire.
They're leaders in their field, and they're here to give you top insights and actionable advice so that you can apply their ideas to your own career or business venture.
Chapter 2: What is Ooooby and how does it decentralize the food supply chain?
Sometimes growth doesn't come from demand. It comes from rethinking the model beneath it. Today on All About Business, I'm joined by Pete Russell, founder of Ubi, short for Out of Our Own Backyards.
Chapter 3: How does Ooooby empower local farmers in the farm-to-table logistics?
Pete has spent more than a decade building technology that helps small local food producers sell directly to their communities, challenging the ways food systems have been organized for the last 80 years.
In this episode, we talk about the long road to finding the right business model, the pivotal decision that unlocked real growth, and why stepping back as CEO can sometimes be the most entrepreneurial move of all. Well, today on All About Business, I'm delighted to welcome Pete Russell.
Chapter 4: Why is low-margin technology crucial for saving small farms?
Pete is originally from Sydney, Australia, but today he's travelled from Totnes in Devon to talk to me. Thank you, Pete, for making the journey. Pete is the founder of a company called Ubi. He's going to explain why it's called Ubi in a moment.
Chapter 5: What misconceptions exist about the cost of local food compared to supermarkets?
But Ubi is a global steward-owned platform designed to support small-scale producers by connecting them with consumers online. I think it's a wonderful concept, which is why I've invited you to talk about it, Pete. And I think it's got all sorts of potential opportunities to grow and evolve to the benefit of everyone.
Food is very much on people's minds, especially at the moment with so much being asked about whether food is safe, whether processed food is good for us, and what's the future way we should be traveling forwards regarding food and food production consumption. And I know you're a person with lots of fresh thinking in this space.
Chapter 6: What challenges do traditional food systems face in today's market?
So thanks for coming in. And let's begin at the beginning. What is Ubi? And why is it called that?
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.
Chapter 7: How has Pete Russell's business adapted through near-death experiences?
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.
Chapter 8: What is the future of food in the context of AI and decentralized platforms?
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.
So if you go to Ubi, which is online, what will you find there?
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. The difference between Ubi and say Shopify is that we're specifically built for this type of business model.
where it's highly recurring, fresh food, usually sort of harvest to order. And so it doesn't just satisfy the e-commerce sales part that you'd get from Shopify. It also manages all of the logistical fulfillment operations around coordinating a very high frequency aggregation of different types of food into a single bundle that can then land on the customer's doorstep.
And I imagine you charge the small producers for this.
We do. We just charge 1.9% of whatever they sell. So it's similar to Shopify in that it's a monthly fee. Shopify charge like a subscription fee. What we charge is a transaction fee, but then also we bundle into our service card transaction fees and so on. So 1.9% is low, isn't it? Well, 1.9% is our cut, and then you've got Stripe on top of that.
It works out in total sort of around about the 3%, 3.5%, depending on the tiers you're on. And what about the delivery? Is that an additional charge? No, we don't touch the food at all. What we give the farms is all the- So they deliver it? They deliver it, but we provide them with the route optimization software.
So the way it works is a farmer will create a shop on Ubi, which displays all the food that they have available on a week-to-week basis. Customers will sign up as a customer to either order a one-off order, or they can subscribe to a regular delivery. The farm can see all the orders coming in.
They can then close the orders and then they will pack those orders and the system will coordinate all of that for them. And then they load those orders into a farm vehicle or they can get a courier to come and collect them on their behalf. And the system will figure out the optimal order of deliveries. And then typically the farmer will drive around, knock on the door,
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