Demand Is Not the Problem. Access Is.

There is no shortage of people in Poland today who want to buy local food – fresh, high‑quality, produced in a region they know and, ideally, sourced directly from farmers. Consumers are willing to pay, to order online, and to support local producers.

The problem is not demand. The problem is access.

Buying local food is too often inconvenient, time‑consuming, and difficult to reconcile with everyday life. And this is precisely why – despite the availability of digital tools and growing consumer interest – local food markets in Poland remain fragile, difficult to scale, and frequently dependent on short‑term projects.

Why is this the case?

The answer emerging from the 2026 report of the APPETIT Living Lab on digitising local food markets, prepared within the CODECS project, is uncomfortable but very clear:

FOR YEARS, “DIGITALISATION” HAS FOCUSED ON TOOLS FOR INDIVIDUAL FARMERS AND PROCESSORS, RATHER THAN ON THE DIGITALISATION OF LOCAL FOOD MARKETS AS A WHOLE.

Digitalisation in agriculture has already happened. Farmers sell online, consumers place orders, and electronic payments have become standard. And yet, increasingly – in discussions with farmers, local authorities, consumers, civil society actors, advisors, and public administration – the words that dominate are not “app” or “platform”, but rather: logistics, organisation, cooperation, responsibility.

There is a growing awareness that the sustainability and scalability of local food markets are determined by what happens after the sale: market organisation, logistics, and the distribution of roles, costs, and responsibilities.

Digitalisation and digital tools are a necessary condition. They facilitate customer contact, demand planning, order collection, and payment processing. But digitalisation alone does not create a market.

Without organisational structures, digitalisation overloads individual farmers rather than stabilising the system as a whole. If digitalisation is not accompanied by organisational solutions and a clear governance model, it merely exposes the weaknesses of the system instead of resolving them.

A useful counterpoint can be found in examples from France, such as La Bardane (a producer‑owned shop) or GAEC des Domaines (a cooperative processing farm). These initiatives show that cooperation between farmers can be durable, profitable, and competitive. But it does not happen automatically.

In these cases, cooperation means:

• a deliberately designed business model for collective action,

• formal organisational and legal structures,

• clear rules for membership and decision‑making,

• shared investments and shared responsibility,

• continuous advisory support for the group rather than for individual farms,

• treating logistics, retail, or processing facilities as shared market infrastructure,

• jointly building competitiveness in the market.

In France, cooperation is not a slogan. It is a designed and managed mechanism.

In Poland, cooperation is frequently discussed, but practice tells a different story:

• Direct farm sales (RHD) and short food supply chain (SFSC) solutions primarily reinforce individual modes of operation,

• advisory services focus on the decisions and capacities of individual farms,

• support programmes reward projects implemented independently,

• logistics and market organisation remain “the farmer’s problem”,

• competitiveness is measured at the level of individual producers rather than at the level of the jointly created local food market.

The result is predictable: cooperation remains a slogan, not a functioning model of action.

If we want to build local food markets that are durable, scalable, and resilient, we need:

• digitalisation of markets, not only of farms,

• organisational solutions enabling collective action,

• clear governance rules: who decides, who pays, and who is responsible for what,

• support for shared structures such as logistics, collection points, marketing, and financial services,

• business models based on co‑creating competitive local food markets,

• public policies that treat the local market as infrastructure – both physical and digital – rather than as a project or a form of income support for individual farms.

The report from the APPETIT Living Lab focus group discussion, which took place in April 2026, is not a report about technology. It explains why without organisation and governance, digitalisation alone is insufficient for the development of local food markets.

The digitalisation of short food supply chains will also be the subject of workshops in Kraków on 13–14 May. (Programme)

The real challenge for policy after 2027 is not whether we are able to sell local food, but whether we are able – with the support of digitalisation – to build the social and organisational infrastructure that allows hundreds of scalable local food markets to function.

makes this clear: without organisational, social, and physical foundations, even the best intentions will not translate into convenient and cost‑competitive access to food directly from farmers.