Agora and Agora Marketplace › Knowledge & Inspiration › Cooperatives · 9 min read
Robin is a new cooperative food market in Tilburg, the Netherlands.
The core idea is simple: farmers and city residents jointly organize their food supply.
Robin aims to make healthy, regional, and sustainably produced food accessible to as many people as possible—regardless of their income.
This is not just about creating another supermarket.
Robin seeks to reorganize the relationships between agriculture, food supply, pricing, responsibility, and community.
Name: Robin
Location: Tilburg, Netherlands
Form: Cooperative of citizens and farmers
Status: In development
Planned launch: Second half of 2027
Initial goal: 1,000 expressions of interest from Tilburg
Supply target: Approximately 2,500 people
Planned regional farms: Approximately 5–10
Core principle: Community-organized food supply with socially tiered contributions
Robin aims to create a food supply system where people do not simply shop as anonymous customers.
Instead, they become members of a cooperative.
The participating farmers are also members.
This creates a structure in which both sides share responsibility:
Robin therefore describes itself as a cooperative market rather than a conventional supermarket.
A central idea of Robin is to reduce unnecessary intermediaries between production and consumption.
In the conventional food retail system, a product often passes through several stages:
Agriculture → Processing → Wholesale → Distribution → Retail → Consumer
Each additional stage introduces its own costs, margins, and structures.
Robin aims to organize a larger portion of this directly between:
Farmers ↔ Cooperative ↔ Members
This is intended to create more economic flexibility to simultaneously:
Robin does not aim to replicate the full range of a conventional supermarket.
Instead, the plan is to offer a selection of foods that people need for their daily nutrition.
This includes, among others:
Robin describes the planned range as roughly 20% of the product variety of a conventional supermarket.
The goal is to provide enough food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner throughout the year.
Additionally, products from other European regions that cannot be produced in the Netherlands will be offered, such as:
Products whose supply chains are primarily outside Europe—such as coffee, chocolate, or pineapple—are not part of the current concept.
A particularly interesting aspect of the Robin model is its pricing structure.
Not all members are expected to contribute the same amount financially.
Instead, there are three categories:
People with greater financial means contribute more than those with a smaller budget.
A member’s contribution category will not be visible to others when collecting food.
→ Decision aid for contribution category
The final contributions have not yet been determined.
Robin currently formulates the following goals:
Households with average income
→ Approximately 10–25% less than their previous average food expenditures
Households with lower income
→ Approximately 20–50% less
Households with higher income
→ Approximately at the level of the average market price
This creates a form of solidarity cross-subsidization within the community.
Those who can contribute more enable others to pay less.
The model also differs from conventional supermarkets in how payment works.
Members are expected to pay a fixed monthly contribution.
This is based primarily on:
Within the system, members can then select the foods they actually need.
Products are scanned when leaving the pickup location.
This serves, among other things, to track quantities and product flows and plan the supply accordingly.
Robin does not just want to distribute food but also build a long-term connection between members and agriculture.
To this end, a three-year commitment is planned.
The reason is the need for planning security for agricultural businesses.
Agriculture does not operate on a week-to-week basis.
Farms must decide far in advance:
If it is known how many people will support the system long-term, producers can plan their production much more reliably.
Another key difference from the conventional market concerns the risk of a poor harvest.
In the traditional system, much of this risk remains with the farms.
Robin aims to share this risk more collectively.
Farmers should not be paid solely based on the actual harvest but also for their work and contribution to the shared supply system.
Additionally, a shared fund is planned, financed by member contributions, to secure the food supply in unexpected situations.
Robin aims to work with regional farmers and enable them to receive a price that truly supports their work.
The focus is not solely on existing organic certification.
Robin lists the following goals, among others:
Farmers should be economically supported even during this transition.
For joint quality development, Robin plans to use a Participatory Guarantee System (PGS).
In such a system, quality is not assessed solely by an external certification body.
Farmers and members jointly examine:
This makes quality a shared development process.
For TEIKEI, this approach is particularly interesting because PGS can also serve as an important foundation for community-driven quality development.
Robin is organized as a cooperative with members.
Both:
Farmers
and
Residents
can become members.
According to the described principle, each member has an equal vote.
Contributing more money does not mean more decision-making power.
Robin formulates several core principles for this:
Value created within the cooperative should benefit the members and the community, not individual investors.
Robin does not view food merely as a commodity.
Food can also be a starting point for encounters and shared learning.
Planned or considered activities include:
Participation in these activities will remain voluntary.
For the first location in Tilburg, the current plan is:
5–10 regional agricultural businesses
will supply approximately:
2,500 people.
Before the structure is established, Robin first aims to gather at least:
1,000 expressions of interest
from people in Tilburg.
This expression of interest is initially non-binding.
Only when:
are more concretely defined will interested parties decide whether they actually want to become members.
How exactly the food will be distributed is not yet finalized.
Robin lists several possibilities for Tilburg:
Which form makes sense will be decided together with future members.
This means that infrastructure is not built first and then people are brought in.
Instead, the concrete infrastructure will be developed based on the needs of the emerging community.
Robin and TEIKEI are independent projects.
Nevertheless, there are several structural questions that both models are addressing.
Particularly interesting aspects include:
Agriculture and consumption are not viewed as two separate sides of the market.
Both become part of a shared structure.
Long-term commitment creates planning security for farms.
Crop failures and other uncertainties should not rest solely with producers.
Access to good food is not made dependent solely on individual income.
Quality is assessed and developed jointly.
A significant portion of the supply should come from the region and be supplemented by meaningful European products.
The connection between agriculture and people should become more direct.
The food market is not just seen as a sales location but as collectively supported infrastructure.
Robin is still in development. This makes it all the more worthwhile to observe its further progress.
Interesting questions include:
These questions can also provide valuable insights for the further development of the TEIKEI Agora and regional supply communities.
Robin is currently still in development.
2026
→ Further development of the model and collection of initial expressions of interest
By the end of 2026
→ Goal of at least 1,000 supporters in Tilburg
2027
→ Establishment of locations, partnerships, and practical infrastructure
Second half of 2027
→ Targeted launch of the first Robin in Tilburg
The exact timeline depends, among other things, on whether sufficient members, suitable locations, financing, and partnerships can be found.
Robin represents an interesting attempt to transfer elements of community-supported agriculture from individual farm communities to the level of everyday urban food supply.
What makes it particularly exciting is the combination of:
Regional agriculture + long-term membership + social pricing + shared responsibility + PGS + a practical everyday food supply.
For the TEIKEI Agora, Robin is not interesting because the model could simply be adopted.
The key question is:
What solutions does Robin develop for problems that other community-organized supply systems are also working on—and what can we learn from them?
↑ One level up: Cooperatives
By Felix Schröder, with support from AI (ChatGPT)
Created on September 9, 2026 · Last updated on September 9, 2026
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