Marchewka Mobilna bonds

When considering ways of supporting and strengthening the development of local food markets, we seldom pay attention to financial innovations. That's why it's important to take note of Marchewka Mobilna, an online food market operating in Kraków. The Marchewka Mobilna consortium was created by a group of six farmers together with IsoTech. The consortium is introducing the bond as a solution that may change the way local food markets are financed in Poland.

We are talking about Marchewka Mobilna Bonds — a financial tool based not on donations, grants, or projects, but on a business logic that requires clarity, sustainability and responsibility for developing the local food market as a business venture. For those purchasing bonds, it is an investment bringing concrete benefits.

It’s not a solution that has appeared out of thin air.

It's part of a longer story. It results from more than 10 years of shared experience of a group of farmers who have pioneered direct sales individually and jointly. Step by step their ideas have translated into practical results that have involved more and more ambitious forms of joint action.

Whereas they have managed with securing capital for their own individual business development, securing shared capital for joint pre-farming season investment has always been one of the major challenges. This has held back growth of the Marchewka Mobilna local food market.

A decade of experience with direct sales

The story goes back to 2011, when the Environmental Partnership Foundation launched multiple initiatives to shorten food supply chains as part of a Swiss-Polish project entitled “Local Product Małopolska”.

It began with cooperation with Eco-delicatessen in Solvay Park and the Parkowe Wzgorze housing estate near Krakow. Next in 2013, a farmer initiative group helped establish the Parsley Market (Targ Pietruszkowy) in the Podgorze District of Kraków – a first in Krakówfarmers’ market that quickly became a meeting place for local food producers and Kraków residents. It's thriving still today.Then came a second farmers’ market initiative in the CHT in Płaszow District (2015-17), a buyers’ club linked to the BAL restaurant (2014-15) and others.

In 2015, the group of farmers and consumers created the Koszyk Lisiecki (Liszki Basket) which was one of the first attempts to initiate collective ‘direct-from-the-farmer’ sales on line, along with Bistro Marchewka (Carrot Bistro) in the Nowa Huta Cultural Centre — a restaurant operating on a direct “farmer → kitchen” relationship. This is where the realities of shortening the supply chain in the restaurant and catering context to buy directly from farmers were confronted on a day-to-day basis.

COVID forced the closure of the Bistro in 2021, but led to a flowering of the Koszyk Lisiecki and prompted creation of Marchewka Mobilna (Mobile Carrot). The farmers and organisers involved recognized that the future of local food markets is digitisation and on-line .

All of these initiatives share one thing: they were built largely by the same farmers, who have over time developed their own understanding of the local food market and the need for joint action and a conviction that intermediaries need to be replaced. They have accumulated skills, product offerings, collaboration models, and developed their own businesses. And what's more they are mentoring the next generation of farmers, including their sons and daughters.

Marchewka Mobilna is a business venture

The software created for Koszyk Lisiecki provided the starting point for developing a local online food market. It’s important to note that the goal was not to build yet another online shop, but to recreate an online version of a marketplace where many farmers and many buyers could interact with another without intermediaries. The assumption was simple: individual benefits arise from joint action. And it is the joint action that requires solutions and investment. Not ever more efficient intermediaries.

The challenge of digitalization is to build a durable, resilient, scalable marketplace based on direct sales that put farmers ‘in-charge’ — this is likely the only business model that can keep small-scale farmers and food processes competitive in a context dominated by large-scale industrial food.

In 2023, the APPETIT Living Lab was created to develop digital and organizational solutions using the new APPETIT technology (the successor to the Koszyk Lisiecki platform). The ambition was to find a way to eliminate intermediaries, thereby fundamentally changing the power structure and lowering transaction costs for participating farmers and consumers.

One of the Lab’s locations is Kraków and the Marchewka Mobilna local food market. Others include Kamienna Góra (ZZiemi.pl), Chojnice (koszykchojnicki.pl), and Częstochowa (spizarnia24.net).

In 2025, the consortium deployed the APPETIT platform, testing, adapting and refining by supporting sales and logistics in real situations. APPETIT implementation saw participating farmers and food producers become individually more independent and self-organising as they took over joint action tasks conventionally provided by intermediaries.

In Marchewka Mobilna, it is the farmers who decide on prices, availability and presentation of their products or indeed whether they will participate in a specific sales session or not. Farmers receive payment directly from the customer, who in turn is able to make one payment for a basket of products from several farmers.

Coordinated joint action on marketing and logistics saves farmers enormous amounts of time, allowing them to focus on production and reducing the costs of their own operations.

As a result, the Marchewka Mobilna market has become:

• automated, especially in payments and invoicing

• transparent and predictable

• resilient when it comes to human error

• scalable in the sense of accommodating more users

• based on direct farmer-consumer relations

Preparing for the 2026 farming season

The year 2026 is a growth year for Marchewka Mobilna:

• more producers and customers

• broader product assortment

• new pickup points

• logistics modernization

• streamlined onboarding of new users

• and capacity to handle 200+ monthly orders

Winter and early spring is when investment matters.

That is why capital is needed here and now for specified investments. Future grants are simply not relevant.

An innovation not yet seen in local food markets (in Poland)

Breaking out of a dependence on grant and donation logic, the consortium is deploying a financial instrument Marchewka Mobilna Bond — a private issuance worth in total PLN 200,000 (approx. US$55,000) that is dedicated to investments in logistics, pickup points, onboarding, and marketing.

Bonds are a well-established financial instrument, but they have never been applied to develop joint action on marketing, sales and distribution in the local food market context (at least in Poland). For Marchewka Mobilna, the bond issuance is a way of mobilising funds precisely when they are needed. The bond instrument also

• embeds a business financing mindset

• strengthens farmers’ autonomy

• disciplines spending

• enables growth without dependency on grants or donations.

Marchewka Mobilna farmers have operated as entrepreneurs — producing, selling, and investing in their individual local food businesses, while trying always to join forces. The bond simply formalizes their business logic by extending it to business financing for strengthening and growing joint action.

Benefits for investors

For the investor, purchasing a bond means parking capital for 3 years (from PLN 1,000 to PLN 20,000 that’s equivalent to US$250 to US$5500) with Marchewka Mobilna instead of in a bank. After the bond period, the investor receives the contributed amount back and earns interest along the way. In addition, the option to convert the bonds into shares in the future Marchewka Mobilna company that is planned.

But financial returns are only part of the story. The investor becomes part of a community actively improving the food system: strengthening direct sales, logistics, and the stability of small farms and artisanal producers, while increasing access to fresh, tasty food that is chemical-free. Solutions can and need to be shared wider than Kraków.

Investors from Kraków benefit from a richer and more stable local offer here and now; investors from outside Kraków build a bridge to the city and gain insights useful for creating or improving local food markets in their own communities or locations that matter to them.

Innovating to change the rules of the game

Marchewka Mobilna Bonds are not a marketing campaign.

This is not fundraising for a noble cause.

They are a financial innovation that has been adapted by an experienced consortium based in the Krakow area that has spent a decade learning how to build a local food market based on cooperation and technology. The ambition is to grow Marchewka Mobilna as a business venture that delivers also on social,, environmental and economic goals.

When the bond issue initiative runs its course, it will be refined and replicated as a tool made available for other locations — in Poland and abroad — wherever the APPETIT platform can be adapted to local needs, circumstances and opportunities.

How APPETIT Powers Local Food Markets: Marchewka Mobilna in Krakow Explained (CODECS DEMO EVENT)

Visit Marchewka Mobilna: https://marchewkamobilna.pl

More information (IsoTech): rafal.serafin@isotech24.eu

Marchewka Mobilna Bond Issuance runs until: 1 March 2026