BoerBox

Over het initiatief / About the initiative

In welke fase zit jouw initiatief? / In what stage is your initiative?

Ideefase

Heb je jouw initiatief al gevalideerd? / Did you validate your initiative?

In progress. We are in contact with the chairman of the LLTB, other farmer associations, as well as Rabobank's agriculture department. We will begin restaurant surveys as soon as we get pricing data from farmers.

Meer informatie over jouw initiatief / More info about your initiative

Big supermarkets pay farmers up to 50% less for B grade produce, while reducing prices as little as 10%. We aim to narrow this gap, ensuring fairer pay for farmers and providing strong sustainability marketing for our customers. BoerBox delivers imperfect produce directly to eco-conscious restaurants and caterers at significant discounts. We believe that we can compete on price with traditional wholesalers like Hanos and Metro, since they don’t utilize B grade. This results in a win-win: farmers are paid more than they otherwise would be for their B grade produce, and restaurants pay less for their fresh produce and can utilize strong sustainability marketing.

Wat is er anders/nieuw aan jouw idee/oplossing t.o.v. bestaande oplossingen? / What is different/new about your idea/solution compared to existing solutions??

Other solutions in the Netherlands focus on B2C or have other concepts/focus (artisan, turning waste into new products, etc.). There are some startups with similar business models in other countries (notably Querfeld and Soplaya), which do seem to suggest that this model can work. However, we didn’t find anyone doing this in the Netherlands. We believe the Netherlands is a great place for this, since it is the 2nd largest food exporter in the world, with a 58bn euro produce market (growing at 12.8%) and a 1.7bn euro B grade opportunity. Limburg is of course a great region to start this initiative in, since it is full of farmers, restaurants and also sustainability conscious students and young professionals.

Wat zijn jouw volgende stappen om het verder te ontwikkelen? / What are your next steps to develop the initiative?

Our next steps are first validating our idea by getting pricing data from farmers and surveying restaurants. If the results are positive, we will continue by launching a pilot. We already have one restaurant interested in that pilot. After the pilot, we will slowly expand operations, using basic logistics like renting trucks, delivering everything ourselves and using excel and google forms. If that all goes well, we plan on contracting with a logistics company (we are already in talks with one and researching others) and developing a web portal for restaurants to order and farmers to input what B grade they have available. From there we will continue to expand across Limburg and eventually beyond.

Wat heb je nodig om (nog meer) impact te maken met dit initiatief? / What do you need to make (more) impact with this initiative?

We will need some funding for the initial pilot and first few deliveries, before we have cash flows. We could also use contacts to more restaurants. If there are any other initiatives that involve restaurants, we’d love to talk with them and potentially use their network.