About

Food is one of the most intimate things we do every day, and one of the most outsourced. We eat three or more times a day, every day, and yet most of us no longer grow, cook, or even meet the things we eat in their original form.

What reaches our plates passes through a system most of us can't see and few of us trust.

The costs accumulate quietly. Chronic disease tracks closely with what we eat and what we don't. Food cultures and the small farms that anchored them have largely disappeared in a generation. Soil is exhausted, biodiversity is collapsing, and the supply chain that connects all of it is optimized for shelf life above almost everything else.

We believe food is culture, not commodity. And the system that delivers it can be redesigned.

What Open Food Lab is

Open Food Lab is an incubator for people, projects, and organizations working to reshape food. We build platforms, run programs, and launch new ventures into the world, designed from the start so that others can copy what works.

Our mission is to redesign how food is grown, distributed, and shared. That redesign won't happen through policy or persuasion alone. It happens through better systems, built and proven in the world.

Our philosophy

Change happens by building

You can argue about the food system endlessly, and many do. We're more interested in what working alternatives look like once they actually exist. A platform that makes healthy eating easy, a school that teaches food from soil to plate, a farm that proves regenerative practice at scale: these are the arguments that move things.

That's why the lab is organized as a portfolio of projects rather than a research institute. Each project is a working example, built to demonstrate what's possible and to be adopted by anyone who wants to build on it.

Three challenges across the food system

Our projects are organized around three connected challenges that together cover most of what needs to change.

Food Production

Growing food in a way that protects what feeds us.

Industrial agriculture has fed the world at the cost of the systems it depends on. Soil, water, pollinators, and rural communities have all been drawn down to keep yields high. Regenerative practices, agroforestry, and small-scale local production point toward a different model: one that builds the ground back up while it grows.

Food Education

Rebuilding the literacy that one generation lost.

Most people today can't cook a meal from raw ingredients, name what's in season, or trace what's on their plate back to where it came from. Food literacy has collapsed in roughly two generations, and almost nothing in modern life rebuilds it by default. We treat education as the lever that reconnects people to food at the most personal scale.

Healthy Diets

Making the healthy choice the easy choice.

Ultra-processed food is cheap, convenient, and almost inescapable. Healthy food costs more, takes longer, and is steadily harder for most people to access. Closing that gap is one of the central challenges of the modern food system, and it won't be solved by telling people to eat better.

Built in the open

Most food work happens inside companies, where successful models stay proprietary and failures stay quiet. Open Food Lab is built on the opposite assumption: that the systems we need will spread faster if no one owns them.

In practice, that means our projects are documented in the open. Frameworks, playbooks, source material, and the lessons we learned along the way all live in the Commons, free to use and free to adapt. We share what works, and we share what didn't.

The lab convenes practitioners from across the food system: farmers, chefs, educators, technologists, nutritionists, designers, and policy people. Some collaborate on a single project. Some help build whole platforms. The lab is the connective tissue that lets work pool and compound.

We're part of a wider movement of open labs building shared infrastructure for emerging fields, alongside Open Water Lab, Bioregional Systems Lab, and others working in adjacent territory. The shift the food system needs is too large for any one organization, and the answer isn't a bigger one. It's a network of working examples, built together and shared widely.

From commodity toward culture. Built in kitchens, on farms, and in the open.

Get in touch

Open Food Lab works in the open, which means the door is open. Whether you want to use something from the Commons, contribute to a project, partner on something new, or just ask a question, we'd like to hear from you.

Open Food Lab

^{C/O Lumeon Labs}

Åsterudveien 32 1344 Haslum, Norway

[e-mail] openfoodlab.org [phone]