Investing in more resilient food systems: why Marchewka Mobilna is looking to Ukraine
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When people first hear about Marchewka Mobilna, an IT-enabled local food market operating in Kraków (Poland), they often assume it is simply another food delivery service or online marketplace for local producers.
It is not.
Marchewka Mobilna was established as a consortium of 7 farmers brought together by IsoTech. The motivation was to provide a response to a growing structural challenge facing Polish agriculture: how to ensure that small and medium-sized farms remain economically viable in a rapidly changing food system and an economy and society transforming through digitisation.
Poland remains one of Europe's agricultural powerhouses. Over a million farms operate across the country with around 90% in the small and medium sized category (less than 50 ha). The future of Polish agriculture will not be determined solely by the success of large export-oriented farms. It will also depend on whether hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized family farms can find commercially viable ways to participate in an increasingly digital economy. Marchewka Mobilna is focused specifically on this challenge
Small and medium farms are only slowly coming to be seen as much more than food producers. They sustain rural livelihoods, preserve agricultural knowledge, maintain local landscapes and contribute to food security, biodiversity and community resilience. Since 2017, they also have new opportunities to sell directly to consumers.
Yet the environment in which all farms operate is changing rapidly. Consumers increasingly expect digital services, online ordering and transparency. They want to buy directly from farmers. Supply chains are becoming data-driven. Marketing, logistics, financial transactions and regulatory compliance are increasingly digital. Artificial intelligence and platform technologies are beginning to transform how markets function and how value is created. At the same time, investment and innovation continue to favour large-scale, export-oriented agricultural enterprises.
For many small and medium-sized farms, the challenge is not simply adapting to agricultural change. It is adapting to a rapidly digitising economy and society.
Every year, approximately 20,000 farms disappear across Poland. Many are potentially productive businesses, yet they struggle to reach customers efficiently, participate in digital marketplaces or access the organisational capabilities required to compete in modern food systems. The problem is not that Poland lacks farmers or consumers interested in buying non-industrial food. The problem is that farms are scattered with many farmers lacking efficient access to markets in which products can be sold directly to customers.
Marchewka Mobilna exists to address that challenge. Marchewka Mobilna is based on a simple proposition. Small and medium-sized farms often struggle not because they cannot produce food, but because they cannot efficiently access markets on their own. By sharing logistics, coordinating orders and reducing dependence on traditional intermediaries, producers can retain a larger share of the value they create. Consumers benefit from greater access to locally-produced food, while transaction costs can fall as participation grows.
The significance of this approach is that it offers a pathway toward commercially viable local food markets. Rather than relying permanently on subsidies or grants, Marchewka is seeking to demonstrate that cooperation, digital infrastructure and shared services can create business models that become stronger and more profitable as they scale.
The venture sits within a broader shift in thinking. Increasingly, food is being recognised not merely as a commercial sector but as part of critical infrastructure. Cities such as Krakow are exploring how food security, food sovereignty, sustainability and local economic development can be strengthened through more resilient local and regional food systems.
The goal is not to replace existing food systems. The goal is to complement them with stronger local and regional food markets that enable producers to retain more value while giving consumers better access to locally produced food. This perspective is strongly aligned with the work of the Sustainable Economy Institute, which argues that resilient economies require more than successful export sectors. They also require healthy local and regional markets that keep wealth, skills, knowledge and decision-making capacity rooted in communities.
For Krakow, these ideas are becoming increasingly practical. The city is exploring ways to revitalise farmers' markets, improve access to local food and strengthen relationships between urban consumers and regional producers. Marchewka Mobilna is helping transform those ambitions into a practical operating model. But if local food systems are to become a meaningful part of Europe's future, they must do more than succeed in one city.
They must become scalable. That is where two strategic opportunities come together: collaboration with innovative local and regional partners in Ukraine and the development of GeniHub, a platform designed to make ecosystem-based development repeatable across multiple locations.
Together, they form the foundation of Marchewka Mobilna's next phase of growth and the rationale behind the Series B Bond offering, which is intended to help move the venture from proof of concept toward a scalable ecosystem model capable of deployment beyond Kraków.
Why consider purchasing Series B Marchewka Bonds?
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Local food markets as strategic infrastructure
For decades, food systems have been evaluated primarily through the lenses of productivity, efficiency and international competitiveness. Those considerations remain important, but recent events have highlighted a broader reality. The COVID-19 pandemic, climate-related disruptions, trade wars and Russia's war against Ukraine have demonstrated that food systems are also a matter of resilience.
A resilient food system helps communities withstand disruptions, support local businesses, strengthen supply-chain security and create economic opportunities close to where people live. It contributes not only to food security but also to social cohesion, environmental sustainability and regional development.
This perspective is reflected in a recent report by the Warsaw-based Sustainable Economy Institute, Different Pathways, Common Ground: Business Models for Modern Farming in Poland, which argues that modern agriculture requires both internationally competitive export sectors and stronger local and regional food economies capable of retaining economic value within communities.
For investors, this shift is significant. Food security, local resilience and regional economic development are increasingly creating demand for new organisational models capable of connecting producers and consumers more efficiently. Municipalities are taking a greater interest in food systems. Consumers are seeking greater transparency and shorter supply chains. Producers are looking for alternatives to increasingly concentrated market structures.
Together, these trends create a growing market opportunity.
Marchewka Mobilna is being developed as a practical response to that opportunity. By connecting producers and consumers through shared logistics, digital coordination and ecosystem collaboration, it seeks to create food systems that are not only more resilient, but also more economically efficient. The objective is not simply to strengthen local food markets. It is to demonstrate that local and regional food ecosystems can become commercially sustainable while delivering wider social and environmental benefits.
Why Ukraine Matters
At first glance, cooperation with communities in Ukraine's Khmelnytskyi region may seem unrelated to the future of small farms in Poland or Kraków's ambition to strengthen local food security. In reality, the challenges facing both countries are becoming increasingly connected.
The relationship between Marchewka Mobilna and local food initiatives in Ukraine emerged through cooperation supported by the Swedish Institute Baltic Sea Neighbourhood Programme, which brings together partners from Sweden, Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania and Latvia to explore pathways for growing local markets for locally produced food as contributors to food security, resilience and rural development. The initiative is specifically focused on strengthening local and regional food chains as viable business ventures and contributors to food security.
Through this initiative, partners from Kraków and the Khmelnytskyi region have begun building a practical learning and mutual-support partnership focused on understanding how local food ecosystems can grow, strengthen and replicate themselves in different contexts.
Russia's war against Ukraine has accelerated this conversation. Critical infrastructure, including energy systems, water networks, transport links and food supply chains, has repeatedly come under attack. In response, Ukrainian communities have developed remarkable capacities for adaptation and self-organisation. Local food initiatives have become part of a broader resilience strategy, helping communities maintain food access while laying foundations for reconstruction.
For Marchewka Mobilna, this experience has practical value. Ukrainian communities are generating real-world knowledge about resilience, decentralisation, local production, collaborative logistics and rapid adaptation under conditions of uncertainty. These are increasingly relevant capabilities in a world characterised by climate disruption, supply-chain volatility and economic uncertainty.
According to Anatolyi Tkachuk of the Civil Society Institute, what makes this particularly relevant is that Ukraine is not simply rebuilding infrastructure. This is why many are now also reconsidering the structure of the post-war food system. There is growing recognition that food security cannot depend exclusively on highly centralised systems. Local and regional food economies, supported by small and medium-sized farms, have an important role to play in building resilience, strengthening communities and increasing local control over essential systems.
In this sense, Poland and Ukraine are confronting related challenges from opposite directions. Many in Poland are campaigning to preserve a diverse small-farm sector that already exists. Ukraine is rebuilding one as part of a long-term reconstruction effort.
One country is seeking ways to sustain local food economies. The other is rebuilding them. Together they create a uniquely valuable environment for learning, experimentation and innovation.
This matters because the Kraków-Khmelnytskyi partnership functions as a distributed innovation laboratory. Lessons learned in one location can strengthen implementation in another, reducing development risk and accelerating the evolution of the Marchewka model. What is being created is not simply an international partnership, but a practical mechanism for continuous learning and improvement.
A Missing Conversation in Ukraine's European Future
Ukraine has long been one of Europe's great agricultural regions. Discussions about Ukraine's future integration into the European Union are often dominated by questions about large farms, export markets, agricultural competitiveness and subsidy systems. These are important questions because they shape how agricultural investment, trade and policy are likely to evolve over the coming decades. There are no easy answers as agricultural policies become more divisive. However, they are not the only questions that matter. Much less attention is devoted to the future of small and medium-sized farms, local food markets and rural communities. This omission is significant.
Poland provides a cautionary example. Despite possessing one of Europe's largest populations of small and medium-sized family farms, the country continues to lose approximately 20,000 farms each year. Market concentration, demographic change, limited market access and increasingly complex supply chains have made it difficult for many smaller producers to remain viable. The consequences extend well beyond agriculture, affecting rural employment, local enterprise, biodiversity and landscape protection, heritage, community resilience and regional economic development.
Ukraine is approaching the same challenge from a different starting point. While Poland is trying to preserve a small and medium-sized farm sector that already exists, Ukraine is rebuilding one as part of reconstruction and resilience-building. One country is seeking ways to protect what it still has. The other is seeking ways to create what it increasingly needs.
From an investor perspective, this matters because it points to a largely underserved market. Much of today's agricultural innovation ecosystem focuses on improving productivity, financing or market access for larger producers. Far less attention is devoted to business models capable of helping thousands of smaller producers cooperate, share resources and participate in increasingly digital markets.
This is precisely where Marchewka Mobilna is positioned.
The Sustainable Economy Institute has argued that stronger local and regional food markets can complement export-oriented agriculture by helping retain value within communities while strengthening resilience and food security. Rather than viewing local food systems as an alternative to international trade, this perspective sees them as an essential part of a more balanced and adaptable agricultural economy.
The collaboration between Kraków and the Khmelnytskyi region is therefore not simply about exchanging experience. It is about exploring what a European food future might look like if local resilience, small and medium-sized farms and regional food security were treated as strategic priorities.
For Marchewka Mobilna, this represents more than a policy discussion. It represents a growing market opportunity.
As governments, communities and producers search for practical ways to strengthen local and regional food economies, the demand for scalable ecosystem models, shared logistics, digital coordination and collaborative market access is likely to increase. Marchewka Mobilna and GeniHub are positioning themselves at the centre of that emerging opportunity.
Reimagining rural futures
Behind the challenge facing small and medium farms lies an equally important demographic challenge.
Across Poland, many young people continue to leave rural areas in search of opportunities elsewhere. Farming is often perceived as physically demanding, financially uncertain and disconnected from the opportunities associated with the digital economy. Around growing cities such as Kraków, productive farmland is also under increasing pressure from urban development. As older farmers retire and fewer successors are willing to take over, many farms gradually disappear, taking with them economic activity, local knowledge and community vitality.
For many farming families, the critical question is no longer whether the farm can survive today. The more important question is whether the next generation sees a future worth building around it.
Marchewka Mobilna is seeking to change that conversation.
Its ambition is not simply to preserve traditional farming. It is to help redefine farming, food processing and rural entrepreneurship as part of a digital future. The objective is to enable smaller producers to participate in markets that were previously difficult to access by providing shared logistics, coordinated sales channels, digital marketplaces and collaborative business services.
Tomorrow's farms will need more than land and production skills. They will also need access to customers, data, digital tools, collaborative logistics and business-support systems. Consumers increasingly expect the convenience of ordering products from multiple producers through a single transaction, while producers increasingly need ways to collaborate without sacrificing their independence. Marchewka Mobilna is being developed as infrastructure that supports these new relationships.
In this vision, small farms are not relics of the past. They become participants in a connected, intelligent and entrepreneurial local economy in which cooperation can create competitive advantages that individual producers would struggle to achieve alone.
Ukraine faces a similar challenge from a different direction. As reconstruction progresses, rural communities will need compelling reasons for younger generations to stay, return and invest their futures locally. Small and medium-sized farms, local food businesses and community-based food ecosystems can become part of a broader reconstruction strategy that creates opportunity, strengthens resilience and keeps more economic value under local and regional control.
In different ways, both Poland and Ukraine are searching for new economic futures for rural areas. One is seeking to revitalise existing communities. The other is rebuilding communities disrupted by war. Both require more than agricultural policy. They require practical business models that enable local producers, entrepreneurs and communities to prosper within an increasingly digital economy.
Marchewka Mobilna seeks to demonstrate that such business models are possible.
Beyond Projects: Building Ecosystems
The key question is not whether local food ecosystems work. There is already substantial evidence that they do. The more important question is whether they can be replicated at scale.
Across Europe, there are hundreds of successful place-based initiatives connecting producers and consumers. Many create economic value, strengthen communities and improve access to local food. Yet most remain limited to a specific geography because their success depends heavily on a small number of highly committed people. Local champions build relationships, coordinate stakeholders, solve problems and maintain momentum. When those individuals move on, growth often slows and replication becomes difficult. This creates a fundamental challenge for investors interested in scalable investments.
A successful local initiative may be valuable to its participants, but its economic potential remains limited if every new location requires rebuilding the same relationships, governance arrangements and operating practices from scratch. Growth becomes expensive, slow and dependent upon an increasing number of coordinators.
The opportunity behind Marchewka Mobilna is therefore not simply creating a successful food market in Kraków. The larger opportunity is demonstrating a model that can be repeated elsewhere.
If the knowledge, governance arrangements, logistics processes and organisational practices developed through Marchewka can be captured, standardised and reused, then each new ecosystem becomes easier and less costly to establish. The economics begin to change. Instead of every initiative functioning as an isolated project, each initiative contributes to a growing body of operational knowledge that strengthens future deployments.
This is precisely the challenge that GeniHub was designed to solve. The platform represents an attempt to transform ecosystem-building from a largely artisanal activity, dependent on exceptional individuals, into a repeatable process supported by shared infrastructure, standardised workflows and cumulative operational intelligence. For investors, this is where the transition from local success to scalable opportunity begins.
GeniHub: coming home to Poland
The relationship between Marchewka Mobilna and GeniHub is not accidental. In many ways, it represents a return to the origins of an idea that has been evolving for more than three decades.
Tokya Dammond, the founder of GeniHub, has been working at the intersection of agriculture, supply chains and ecosystem development since the 1990s. Through his company Symbio, he helped organise networks of organic producers in Poland and connect them with major international customers. At the time, the challenge was remarkably similar to the one facing many small and medium-sized farms today: how to achieve market access, scale and competitiveness without sacrificing independence.
The experience revealed something that remains true today. Technology can help, but technology alone is never enough. Successful producer networks depend on trust, governance, communication, logistics, transparent rules and a shared understanding of how value is created and distributed. Building these capabilities required years of experimentation and practical learning.
Those experiences also revealed a deeper challenge. A successful ecosystem could be built in one place. The far more difficult task was replicating that success elsewhere. Knowledge existed. Proven organisational models existed. But they remained largely embedded within people. Every new initiative depended on experienced facilitators transferring knowledge and rebuilding relationships from the ground up.
Over time, this realisation helped shape the vision behind GeniHub. Rather than treating ecosystem development as a collection of individual projects, GeniHub seeks to transform accumulated experience into reusable infrastructure. Governance practices, onboarding procedures, transaction management systems, logistics processes and ecosystem intelligence can increasingly be captured, standardised and shared.
From an investor perspective, this matters because it reduces execution risk. GeniHub is not emerging from a theoretical business plan or a software laboratory. It is emerging from decades of practical experience in agriculture, producer cooperation and supply-chain innovation.
The partnership between IsoTech-enabled Marchewka Mobilna and GeniHub therefore represents more than a commercial collaboration. It represents a return to Poland and a new beginning.
Poland's large population of independent family farms provides an ideal environment in which to test and refine ecosystem-based approaches to market access and producer collaboration. Marchewka Mobilna provides the real-world environment through which these ideas can be validated, improved and eventually replicated in the form of hundreds of Marchewka-like local food markets across Poland and Ukraine.
What Symbio explored through producer networks in the 1990s, GeniHub now seeks to enable at much greater scale through digital infrastructure.
GeniHub: making ecosystems scalable
At the centre of IsoTech's long-term strategy sits GeniHub, an emerging transaction, ERP, governance and intelligence platform specifically designed for multi-actor ecosystems.
Most software platforms are designed to improve the efficiency of a single organisation. GeniHub is being developed to improve the performance of entire ecosystems consisting of multiple independent actors including producers, consumers, municipalities, community organisations, logistics providers and service partners.
This distinction is important because the challenge facing local food ecosystems is not simply managing transactions. The challenge is coordinating many independent participants efficiently enough to create economic value while preserving local ownership and decision-making.
GeniHub seeks to address this challenge by transforming ecosystem knowledge into operational infrastructure. Governance processes become embedded workflows. Onboarding procedures become standardised. Transaction management becomes structured. Logistics coordination becomes repeatable. Traceability becomes automated. Ecosystem intelligence becomes cumulative.
As a result, activities that would traditionally require extensive manual coordination can increasingly be supported through shared digital infrastructure. The most important feature of GeniHub is not automation. It is learning. Every ecosystem generates knowledge. Every producer onboarding process reveals opportunities for improvement. Every transaction creates operational insight. Every logistics challenge generates experience. Every governance decision contributes practical lessons about how ecosystems function.
Historically, much of this knowledge remained local. GeniHub seeks to capture it. This means that every successful deployment has the potential to improve future deployments. Lessons learned in Kraków can improve implementation in Kamienna Góra. Experience generated in Khmelnytskyi can support deployment in Częstochowa. Solutions developed in one ecosystem can be adapted and reused elsewhere. The incentive is to expand the network.
In this way, every ecosystem contributes value twice. It creates value locally through transactions and economic activity. It also creates value for the wider network by contributing knowledge, experience and operational intelligence. The result is a model in which each implementation strengthens the next. Deployment risk falls. Replication becomes easier. Operational capabilities improve. Future costs can be reduced.
What emerges is not simply a collection of local food markets. It becomes a continuously improving ecosystem network. In simple terms, IsoTech knows how to build ecosystems, as with Marchewka Mobilna in Krakow, GeniHub makes those ecosystems scalable.
Prospective Series B Investors
The Marchewka Mobilna Series B Bond is not simply financing the expansion of a local food marketplace. It is financing the next stage in demonstrating that local food ecosystems can become commercially viable, scalable and investable.
An important part of the risk has already been removed. Thanks to capital raised through the Series A Marchewka Bond issue, the venture has validated key elements of its intermediary-free business model. Marchewka Mobilna has engaged 27 producers offering more than 300 products, attracted 75 repeat customers and facilitated more than 400 transactions. These results demonstrate that producers are willing to collaborate, consumers are willing to purchase local food through coordinated ordering systems and communities are willing to support new approaches to strengthening local food economies.
The challenge now is no longer proving that demand exists. The challenge is reducing costs, increasing transaction volumes, improving operating efficiency and building the infrastructure required for replication.
This is where Series B capital becomes important.
Investment from the Series B Bond offering will help expand producer participation, strengthen shared logistics capabilities, improve collection and distribution infrastructure, increase transaction volumes and support the integration of GeniHub functionality required for future deployments. Equally important, it will help generate the operational knowledge, performance data and implementation experience needed to validate the Marchewka model beyond a single location.
The objective is straightforward but strategically important. The goal is to move from a successful initiative in Kraków toward a repeatable ecosystem model capable of deployment in other communities. This is also where the partnership with communities in Ukraine becomes valuable. The Krakow-Khmelnytskyi relationship provides an opportunity to test ideas, compare approaches and accelerate learning across different contexts. Combined with the Swedish Institute-supported cooperation network, it creates an international environment for experimentation, learning and mutual support.
GeniHub's role is to capture and operationalise that learning. As governance processes, onboarding methods, logistics solutions and transaction workflows become embedded within shared infrastructure, the cost and complexity of future deployments can decline. The result is a pathway toward growth that relies not only on additional investment and staffing, but also on accumulated knowledge, shared systems and continuously improving digital infrastructure.
As with any innovation venture, success is not guaranteed. The challenge is no longer proving that local food markets can work. Marchewka Mobilna has already demonstrated producer participation, consumer demand and transaction activity. The remaining challenge is demonstrating that these results can be replicated efficiently across multiple locations while continuing to reduce transaction costs and improve operational performance. The purpose of the Series B Bond issue is to help reduce this uncertainty through investment in infrastructure, shared systems, logistics capabilities and the practical learning required to support future replication.
In investment terms, Series A reduced market risk. Series B is focused on reducing scaling risk. If successful, the result will be much more than a larger food marketplace in Kraków. It will provide evidence that local food ecosystems can become repeatable, commercially sustainable and capable of deployment across multiple communities.
The Series B Bond should therefore be viewed not as the endpoint of the journey, but as the investment required to bridge the gap between proof of concept and scalable growth – first in Krakow and then in other locations.
Investing in Food Futures
The long-term opportunity is larger than Marchewka Mobilna itself. Marchewka Mobilna is demonstrating something important: local and regional food markets can become commercially viable when they are organised differently.
Traditional food supply chains depend upon multiple intermediaries, each performing specialised roles while capturing a share of the value created by producers and consumers. Marketing, logistics, customer acquisition, transaction management, administration and information management are often fragmented across multiple organisations. This structure can be highly effective at scale, but it can also make it difficult for smaller producers to compete and retain value.
Marchewka is exploring a different approach. Drawing on principles from the sharing economy, it seeks to organise many of these functions collectively through shared infrastructure and digital coordination. Producers, consumers and service providers participate in an ecosystem where logistics, transactions, communications and governance can increasingly be coordinated through common systems rather than duplicated across multiple organisations. The result is a model in which participation increases efficiency rather than complexity.
This changes the economics of growth.
In conventional models, expansion often requires proportionally more administration, management and infrastructure. In a shared ecosystem model, growth has the potential to spread common costs across a larger number of participants. More producers increase consumer choice. More consumers improve producer opportunities. More transactions generate more operational intelligence. Scale strengthens the ecosystem rather than undermining it.
This insight sits at the heart of the investment thesis. If local food ecosystems can reduce transaction costs through sharing, cooperation and automation, and if those operating methods can be captured and replicated through GeniHub, then profitability can potentially compound across a network of place-based ecosystems without sacrificing local ownership or local control.
Historically, every successful local initiative had to build its own governance systems, logistics arrangements, onboarding processes and stakeholder relationships. Each ecosystem effectively started from scratch. GeniHub seeks to change that dynamic by transforming operational experience into reusable infrastructure. As local food ecosystems emerge in Kraków, Khmelnytskyi, Kamienna Góra, Częstochowa, Chojnice and future locations, they do not compete with one another because each serves its own geography, producers and consumers. Instead, they contribute operational knowledge, governance experience and ecosystem intelligence to a shared platform.
Every deployment makes the next deployment easier. Every ecosystem increases the value of the network. Every successful implementation reduces the cost and risk of future implementations. This creates the possibility of something rarely achieved in local economic development: compounding profitability across multiple place-based ecosystems.
In effect, every ecosystem generates value twice. It creates value locally through transactions and economic activity, while simultaneously contributing knowledge, data and operational intelligence that strengthen future deployments elsewhere. The result is a model in which learning itself becomes an asset, generating investor returns in the process.
Poland already possesses hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized farms seeking viable pathways forward. Ukraine is simultaneously rebuilding a small and medium-sized farm sector as part of its reconstruction and resilience strategy. One country is seeking ways to preserve what it still has. The other is rebuilding what it increasingly needs. Together they create a uniquely valuable learning environment and a potentially significant long-term market opportunity.
Marchewka Mobilna provides the proof of concept. GeniHub provides the scaling mechanism.
The Series B Bond provides the capital required to bridge the gap between local success and broader replication. The significance of this opportunity lies not only in the potential success of Marchewka Mobilna in Kraków. It lies in the possibility that a successful model for strengthening market access, reducing transaction costs and supporting small and medium-sized producers can be reproduced across many communities without requiring the replacement of local ownership and local control.
For Series B Bond investors, the opportunity is therefore much larger than supporting a single local food marketplace. It is an opportunity to participate at an early stage in the development of a new category of local economic infrastructure: digitally enabled food ecosystems that become stronger, more efficient and potentially more profitable as the network grows.
The Series B Bond is not the final destination. It is an investment in determining whether a model that has already demonstrated local viability can evolve into a scalable approach to strengthening rural economies, supporting agricultural renewal, enabling post-war reconstruction and building more resilient food systems across Poland, Ukraine and eventually much of Europe.
For questions and to obtain an Investor Update on Marchewka Mobilna and the Series B Marchewka Bond prospectus, please contact Rafal Serafin – rafal.serafin@isotech24.eu




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