Building a free tool for local food sharing , would love your thoughts

Hello everyone 👋

I’m Aurelia, a gardener and web developer from Moldova, and I’d like to share an experiment I’ve been working on, mainly to get feedback from people who care about land, food, and community.

I grew up around small-scale farming. My parents have a small homestead with cows and a peach and walnut orchard, and they sell their produce locally. Over the years, through gardening myself and listening to permaculture and land-restoration discussions, one question kept coming back to me:

How do people who grow food find people who value it, without middlemen, ads, or pressure to “scale”?

So I started building LocalRoots, a free, ad-free platform focused on:

sharing surplus food

connecting neighbors, farmers, and gardeners locally

helping small food communities form naturally, around proximity and trust

The idea isn’t about “selling more,” but about:

knowing where food comes from

making it easier to share or exchange locally

supporting small growers, hobby gardeners, and homesteads

Right now it’s very much an MVP, but it already allows people to:

list what they grow or produce

discover local food on a map

connect directly through messaging or small groups

I’m not here to promote or sell anything. I’d genuinely love thoughtful feedback from this community:

Does something like this feel useful?

What would make it more aligned with permaculture values?

What would you avoid in a tool like this?

If anyone is curious, the project is here: localroots.earth

Thanks for reading, and for all the knowledge that’s shared on this forum. It’s been an inspiration more than once.

Warmly,
Aurelia

Hi Aurelia,

A warm welcome to Permies!
I'm sorry I didn't see your post earlier - and I'm so very happy I see it now. What a great initiative!
I think sharing the surplus food with the community is a great idea Fruit and nuts tend to come in waves of abundance, and it would be a shame to let it go to waste - sharing, and socialising around sharing is much more fun!

So many exclamation marks in my post!

I'm heading to the website of your initiative now. The front page already looks great.

Hoping more people will take a look and chime in with their feedback.

Well done!

Took a look at the website, looks like a cool idea.  Nothing in my area yet, but things take time to spread, so I understand.  I think this has a lot of potential to grow and become popular though!

Riona Abhainn wrote:Took a look at the website, looks like a cool idea.  Nothing in my area yet, but things take time to spread, so I understand.  I think this has a lot of potential to grow and become popular though!

I agree.  We are currently doing very limited sharing food surpluses, between keen gardeners and our neighbours, and through the local Black-led Mutual Aid. But we know there is much more scope to get gardeners, people with gardens, and food-insecure and local produce appreciating neighbours involved.

Thank you so much for the warm welcome and kind words, I really appreciate it 🙂

This idea actually started from wanting to use something like this myself. For example, I buy eggs from neighbours, they buy milk from my parents, and so on, so I kept thinking there should be a simple way to connect people locally.

I’m really glad you like the idea, and I’d love to hear any thoughts or suggestions after you’ve had a look around the site. I’ve already changed quite a lot based on feedback from people here and elsewhere, so it’s slowly becoming more aligned with community values.

When I first started, it was basically a marketplace where people could post products. Now it’s moving more toward a sharing model, where people can post both what they offer and what they need, and get notified when there’s a match.

If you have any ideas on how it could be improved, I’d really love to hear them.

Aurelia Robu wrote:Thank you so much for the warm welcome and kind words, I really appreciate it 🙂

This idea actually started from wanting to use something like this myself. For example, I buy eggs from neighbours, they buy milk from my parents, and so on, so I kept thinking there should be a simple way to connect people locally.

I’m really glad you like the idea, and I’d love to hear any thoughts or suggestions after you’ve had a look around the site. I’ve already changed quite a lot based on feedback from people here and elsewhere, so it’s slowly becoming more aligned with community values.

When I first started, it was basically a marketplace where people could post products. Now it’s moving more toward a sharing model, where people can post both what they offer and what they need, and get notified when there’s a match.

If you have any ideas on how it could be improved, I’d really love to hear them.

Howdy, fellow techie here!

Love the concept, I've also had one foot in the tech world and another in small scale ag, so this resonates with me a lot.

How are you planning to finance admin/hosting/moderation costs? Have you considered ways to make the farms more indexable to AI tools/search outside of just the web interface?

When I click in to view a region and the listings available, I'm not able to see any details on listings from logged out (which I'm assuming crawlers wouldn't be able to access either).

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with an ad model in my opinion, especially if it allowed me as a grower to advertise my goods somewhere hyper local (based in the USA here, Facebook Marketplace as an example is hit or miss with what they allow you to list).

I think what I'm gravitating towards is optimizing the content in a way that it's able to get eyeballs on it outside the web app, like if I were to search "local microgreens boston" would there be a way on your side to have some nice landing pages for different geo regions that would be either to educate folks in an area of what's available, OR be able to encourage them to be a "root member" or something catchy like that.

Having done a lot of projects, seeding is always the hardest part 😆

What we looked at was a food hub cooperative that the goal was selling direct from the seller to the buyer but the cooperative acted as the delivery service to drop off points in each community.  Because our communities are small and fairly widely separated the goal was for the seller to list what they had available on the common website.  Buyers ordered from the website. Then maybe 2 times per week the food hub delivered to the business in each town that agreed to act as a drop off point.  We never got it implemented but it did look hopeful.  We had a farm that did produce as a shares thing that already delivered to the communities.  They would have let us piggy back on their deliveries.  Because of motor carrier laws they couldn't have charged us without moving themselves into a way more regulated and taxed position.  For a short term experiment they had agreed to do this free anyway.  Longer term we would have needed to find a way to benefit them back without payment.  What killed this project back then was getting the software to run the website.  Guessing AI could be used to create it now.  We had found businesses or chamber of commerce offices in each community that would have been willing to be the drops in each community.  Because of Wyomings food laws most of the regulations were bypassed provided the seller was working directly with the buyer and then we would have been simply a delivery service.  Then since we were dealing with rapidly perishable items the plan was if they were not picked up within a set time period agreed by the buyer and seller the food would go to the local food bank or if not good enough for that to compost in the community garden and how such loss was paid was part of the buy/sell agreement.  Because most of those businesses didn't have large scale refrigeration the plan was a bunch of similar sized coolers with ice and labels for drop location and buyer pickup labels straight from the seller on sealed packages.

D Pecot wrote:

Aurelia Robu wrote:Thank you so much for the warm welcome and kind words, I really appreciate it 🙂

This idea actually started from wanting to use something like this myself. For example, I buy eggs from neighbours, they buy milk from my parents, and so on, so I kept thinking there should be a simple way to connect people locally.

I’m really glad you like the idea, and I’d love to hear any thoughts or suggestions after you’ve had a look around the site. I’ve already changed quite a lot based on feedback from people here and elsewhere, so it’s slowly becoming more aligned with community values.

When I first started, it was basically a marketplace where people could post products. Now it’s moving more toward a sharing model, where people can post both what they offer and what they need, and get notified when there’s a match.

If you have any ideas on how it could be improved, I’d really love to hear them.

Howdy, fellow techie here!

Love the concept, I've also had one foot in the tech world and another in small scale ag, so this resonates with me a lot.

How are you planning to finance admin/hosting/moderation costs? Have you considered ways to make the farms more indexable to AI tools/search outside of just the web interface?

When I click in to view a region and the listings available, I'm not able to see any details on listings from logged out (which I'm assuming crawlers wouldn't be able to access either).

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with an ad model in my opinion, especially if it allowed me as a grower to advertise my goods somewhere hyper local (based in the USA here, Facebook Marketplace as an example is hit or miss with what they allow you to list).

I think what I'm gravitating towards is optimizing the content in a way that it's able to get eyeballs on it outside the web app, like if I were to search "local microgreens boston" would there be a way on your side to have some nice landing pages for different geo regions that would be either to educate folks in an area of what's available, OR be able to encourage them to be a "root member" or something catchy like that.

Having done a lot of projects, seeding is always the hardest part 😆

Hey, really appreciate this — especially coming from someone who’s also straddling tech and small-scale ag 🙂

On the cost side, I haven’t locked in a model yet, but the intention is to keep this as a community-first, non-profit type of project. If it grows, I’d lean toward lightweight approaches like donations or optional support rather than anything extractive. I’m trying to be careful not to introduce incentives that would distort the local dynamics.

Visibility is definitely something I’m actively working on. I’ve started adding separate pages for communities, and featuring more active ones on the homepage. The idea you mentioned — geo-based landing pages like “local microgreens in Boston” — is very much in line with where I think this should go.

On the AI/search side, I haven’t gone deep into it yet, but I’m thinking more in terms of making the content openly accessible and well-structured so it can be indexed naturally (rather than locked behind the app). The logged-out limitation you noticed is a really good catch — that’s something I’ll need to rethink.

And yeah… totally agree on seeding being the hardest part 😄 That’s pretty much where I am right now.

Out of curiosity — have you seen any platforms that handled this kind of local discovery well?

C. Letellier wrote:What we looked at was a food hub cooperative that the goal was selling direct from the seller to the buyer but the cooperative acted as the delivery service to drop off points in each community.  Because our communities are small and fairly widely separated the goal was for the seller to list what they had available on the common website.  Buyers ordered from the website. Then maybe 2 times per week the food hub delivered to the business in each town that agreed to act as a drop off point.  We never got it implemented but it did look hopeful.  We had a farm that did produce as a shares thing that already delivered to the communities.  They would have let us piggy back on their deliveries.  Because of motor carrier laws they couldn't have charged us without moving themselves into a way more regulated and taxed position.  For a short term experiment they had agreed to do this free anyway.  Longer term we would have needed to find a way to benefit them back without payment.  What killed this project back then was getting the software to run the website.  Guessing AI could be used to create it now.  We had found businesses or chamber of commerce offices in each community that would have been willing to be the drops in each community.  Because of Wyomings food laws most of the regulations were bypassed provided the seller was working directly with the buyer and then we would have been simply a delivery service.  Then since we were dealing with rapidly perishable items the plan was if they were not picked up within a set time period agreed by the buyer and seller the food would go to the local food bank or if not good enough for that to compost in the community garden and how such loss was paid was part of the buy/sell agreement.  Because most of those businesses didn't have large scale refrigeration the plan was a bunch of similar sized coolers with ice and labels for drop location and buyer pickup labels straight from the seller on sealed packages.

Thanks a lot for taking the time to share all of this — it’s really interesting to see how far you got with the idea, especially around coordinating listings, drop-off points, and even thinking through edge cases like unclaimed food.

Right now, I’m intentionally starting from a simpler place — just helping people discover each other locally and coordinate directly, without introducing delivery layers yet. But what you described feels like a natural evolution once enough local density exists.

From your description, it sounds like the main blocker back then was the software, not the willingness of people. And you’re right — today, with AI, something like this is much more feasible. Even a couple of years ago, it would have required a much larger team of developers.

I’d be really curious to hear — if something like this existed now, do you think people in your area would actually use it?