LocalFood.bg: local farmers resource network

Help us to foster sustainable local food start-ups in Bulgaria

LocalFood.bg is a network of small local food producers in Bulgaria, which supports their access to the market and promotes policies to regulate home-made food production. Our team is a pioneer in organizing farmers markets in our country, but our experience and feedback shows that the local food producers has serious difficulties to start legal business.

The biggest obstacle to them is not to much financial resources as a scant information on the steps to register and exactly what requirements are sufficient to meet for run regulated business.

Largely the gray market of local food in Bulgaria is a consequence of insufficient or misled information for the smallest producers. It is a significant problem that the institutional experts are not familiar with the specifics and opportunities for the local food producers and instead support them, they soon stumble them.

Bulgarian institutional sites are lacking of easy to understand and implement guidelines for small entrepreneurs.The situation rather prompts them to seek assistance from consultants, which complicates the process and increases the cost of their start.

We want to solve these problems and support the launch of local food start-ups by creating resource site www.localfood.bg,rich in:

– opensource easy guides,
– opensource e-trainings,
– videos,
– webinars,
– education, courses and events calendar.

We plan to offer producers subscription for additional legal, marketing and advertising support and also will encourage producers associations by building community network. The site will be helpful for consumers too, because it will promote local food finder, producers individual pages and calendar of events. Further we plan to run a national training sessions campaign for local producers in 10 Bulgarian cities.

LocalFood.bg will be widely promoted in Facebook, YouTube and Google and we plan to provide a budget for such campaign by Google AdGrants.

With your help, the smallest informal producers from Bulgaria will have a valuable and easy to implement resource site, dedicated to their proper registration, practice, teachings and community building.

As a result of our project we expect that hundreds of innovative small food businesses will be ran.

What we need and what you get

Basically, we need your help to pay for a easy to use, professional platform. We want a helpful website. A really, really helpful website.

We want to develop an open source system to be used by other communities and NGOs around the world.

Now LocalFood.bg is a free beta version.

The perks will include a set of 4 Bulgarian rural food recipes. And if you donate $1,000 or more, your name will go on our first webpage!

The Impact

• If you are a website builder, let us know! 
• Spread the word to friends, family and anyone you think may be interested.
• If there is a way in which our community can be of benefit to you, don’t hesitate to reach out and ask.

Source: ICNW