Janne de Hoop
This week I had a day in Rotterdam.There I got to meet some interesting people. All the meetings I had were driven by our interest in one company: Rotterzwam. This is a company based in Rotterdam harvesting oyster mushrooms from coffee left overs. To learn more about the company we were looking for both the supplier of the coffee and well as the buyer of the oyster mushrooms. This brought us to the Fenix Food Factory. The Fenix Food Factory is a big hall in an old factory building based close to the water in Rotterdam and a fresh market at ‘de Kaap’. We were there for Rechtstreex but there are a lot of small companies based there: Kaapse Brouwers (a brewery), Firma bijten (a butcher), Jordy’s bakery, CiderCider (creating well… cider), Stielman koffiebranders (coffee!), Booij kaasmakers (cheese), Zaak.acht (event organisation) and Bosch & Dejong (a book shop). Rechtstreex is the company selling the oyster mushrooms from Rotterzwam. What they do in general is sell vegetables but also sell prepared food that they make from vegetables that are too old to sell. Being at the Fenix Food Factory I thought Rechstreex was just a small company run by two people in Rotterdam. At home I started to look a little bit more into the company and I found out that they are actually expanding in the rest of the Netherlands. They are now based in Utrecht and Eindhoven next to Rotterdam.
In Eindhoven there were several initiatives with the same idea, but unfortunately they had to stop because of the lack of customers. The idea was the same, but why is it working with Rechtstreex while with others it wasn’t? The idea of Rechstreex is that they sell products from farmers and producers locally and with that create a new food system. They try to be as transparent as possible and the farmers receive a good price for their goods (rechstreex.nl). You can order the products online from a list that features vegetables that are in season. The idea is that is works via ‘wijkchefs’. The ‘wijkchefs’ are people, entrepreneurs, that run a collection point from their home, school, shop or company. This makes it possible for Rechstreex to be easily spread over a whole city enabling people to find a collection point close to their home. The vegetables they sell are not necessarily biological or ecological, but they tell you where the products are coming from: either a ecological farm or a greenhouse in the neighbourhood.
Apparently this concept works! And in the Fenix Food Factory it was clear that the message is also inspiring, since there was this nice collection of small companies. The coffee company was even run by a researcher from the TU Delft. To me this was an inspiring idea, being able to combine those things. May be it would be possible to run such a small company, like being a ‘wijkchef’ for Rechtstreex and at the same time work for a company to guarantee my income. It was an amazing afternoon nonetheless and even if I won’t do anything in the field of running my own small (food) company I found a nice place to eat and don’t forget to drink amazing beers.