WOGI Local Living Labs – Circular Farm-to-Neighbourhood Food Ecosystems

WOGI Local Living Labs is a European urban innovation initiative designed to create circular, resilient and inclusive food systems by reconnecting local and peri-urban production with neighbourhood consumption.

European cities remain dependent on long and vulnerable food supply chains, while small producers often struggle to access urban markets. Conventional logistics systems are designed for large, standardised volumes, making small and seasonal food orders costly to distribute. At the same time, many neighbourhoods face declining local retail, limited access to fresh food and rising delivery costs. These challenges particularly affect smaller cities, peripheral areas, elderly people, people with reduced mobility, low-income households and underserved communities.

WOGI Local Living Labs will develop and demonstrate an integrated circular farm-to-neighbourhood ecosystem. It combines local food aggregation, a digitally coordinated multi-producer marketplace, neighbourhood micro-hubs, low-emission logistics, reusable packaging, reverse logistics, food-surplus redistribution, and food-safety and traceability protocols with locally adapted governance and business models.

The project is positioned primarily under CUE Topic #3 – Rethinking urban production for circular and resilient cities, with 15mC Topic #3 – Nurture neighbourhood economies – activate innovation in local everyday offers as an additional topic. Its purpose is not merely to create another delivery service, but to integrate local and peri-urban food production into urban systems through shared infrastructure, circular resource flows, digital coordination and public-private-community cooperation.

The project applies an Innovation-Oriented Approach and aims to advance the integrated WOGI system from TRL 4 to TRL 7. Urban Living Labs in contrasting European contexts will co-create, demonstrate and validate the system under real-life conditions.

Producers, residents, municipalities, businesses, logistics operators, researchers and civil-society organisations will jointly design and test locally adapted solutions. Each pilot will have a clearly defined neighbourhood, a quantified food-access challenge, an identified producer network, a proposed micro-hub, target order volumes, a user-recruitment strategy and an operational partner responsible for daily implementation.

The project will investigate under which combinations of order density, delivery frequency, micro-hub location and transport mode small-volume local-food distribution becomes economically and environmentally viable. Cargo bikes, electric vehicles, shared logistics, collection points and assisted delivery will be tested alongside reusable packaging and reverse-logistics systems.

Alternative governance models will also be compared, including producer-led cooperatives, municipality-enabled partnerships, platform-led services, anchor-institution models and community enterprises. Particular attention will be given to fair value distribution, data governance, operational responsibilities and continuation after project funding ends.

The Living Labs will assess whether the models improve access to fresh food for elderly people, people with reduced mobility, low-income households and residents of underserved neighbourhoods. These groups will participate directly in co-design and evaluation.

The project will create a new user offer combining products from multiple small producers in one coordinated basket, predictable neighbourhood fulfilment, transparent provenance, inclusive access options and circular packaging returns.

Commercialisation will follow a configurable B2B2C platform-and-operations model. Potential revenue sources include subscriptions, transaction and fulfilment fees, municipal service contracts, software licensing, institutional procurement agreements, micro-hub services and household delivery or membership fees. The project will validate customer demand, willingness to pay, unit economics and break-even conditions.

Rather than imposing one solution on every city, WOGI Local Living Labs will determine which technological, operational and governance components can be shared across Europe and which require local adaptation.

The ultimate goal is a validated, replicable and commercially deployable European model that helps cities strengthen local production and neighbourhood economies, improve access to fresh food, retain value locally, reduce transport emissions and packaging waste, and build more resilient relationships between producers and communities.