Development & Community › … › TEIKEI Founding Clarification Conference · 4 min read · Decided – This Is How It Will Be
Over ten years ago, I (Felix Schröder) started the food campaign.
The idea was actually simple: bring good food directly from farms to people—and let long-term relationships develop from that.
Over the years, this has grown into TEIKEI, TEIKEI Olive, TEIKEI Fruit, communities, pickup points, relationships with farms in different countries, logistics, and eventually our own software.
And we’ve learned a lot in the process.
Above all, one thing:
The real challenge isn’t finding people who want good food. And it isn’t finding farms that practice good agriculture.
The challenge is the bridge in between.
How do we organize ordering, logistics, money, communication, and responsibility in a way that works just as well for a farm as it does for a CSA, a buying group, or a farm shop?
That’s exactly the bridge we’ve been trying to build for years.
Some things worked really well. Some were far too complicated. And some depended too much on individuals—myself included.
Last year, some of this reached its limits. There were conflicts, financial difficulties, and eventually a pause.
But this pause revealed something important:
We don’t have to reinvent everything.
There are already farms. There are communities. There’s FoodTogether. There’s TEIKEI. There’s logistics, software, experience, and people who excel at different parts of this.
Right now, these forces are starting to come together again.
That’s why today, I don’t want to start with the big vision of what a future European food system might look like.
I want to start with something very concrete:
Olive oil and citrus fruits.
We have farms that produce them.
We have communities, CSAs, farm shops, and people who want to buy them.
We have experience with transport, distribution, and community organization.
The question is:
How can we turn this into a long-term, fair, and operationally functional collaboration?
A collaboration where farms are reliably and fairly paid.
Where communities can easily order and participate.
Where logistics work.
And where no single person ends up holding everything together.
This is exactly where, for me, the cooperative becomes interesting.
Not as an end in itself.
And not as a ready-made answer.
But as a possible shared framework for precisely this bridge.
One possible model is a cooperative where producers, CSAs, buying groups, farm and member shops, wholesalers, and consumers can all become part of the same structure.
What already works locally stays regional.
What’s organized together are primarily the tasks between existing structures: bundling demand, planning purchases, coordinating payments and transport, and supporting long-term fair relationships with partner farms.
Agora could enable digital coordination for this, while TEIKEI and FoodTogether connect the regions and partner farms, and Lightwave operates the technical infrastructure.
And if this first works with olive oil and citrus fruits, more farms, products, and communities can join later. Regionally produced food could also become part of the same logistics and distribution structure.
We don’t need to centrally organize the regions themselves.
There are already CSAs, farm shops, cooperatives, wholesalers, and other structures there.
They know best what’s needed locally.
Our task could be much simpler: connecting these existing structures where joint action creates real added value.
That’s why we’re here today.
Not to rubber-stamp a ready-made TEIKEI cooperative.
But to ask, very practically:
What would we need to organize together to make this bridge really work?
What belongs in a cooperative?
What should explicitly remain with the farms and regions?
Who can take on which responsibilities?
And above all: Who wants to be directly involved from here on?
Who already sees a concrete role for themselves?
Who wants to contribute something specific?
And who is open to continuing on this path, even if it’s not yet clear what their exact role will be?
Today is also about making visible: Who stands where, who wants to move forward together, and who is ready to be part of the further process as it takes shape step by step?
If we find initial clear answers to this today, then for me, we’ve achieved a lot.
It’s not about deciding everything today.
It’s about figuring out what we want to carry together, what’s really needed for that, and who is ready to take responsibility for it.
And building a bridge that eventually works so naturally that we no longer constantly have to talk about the bridge itself.
↑ Up one level: TEIKEI Founding Clarification Conference
By Felix Schröder, with support from AI (ChatGPT)
Created on September 29, 2026 · Last updated on October 6, 2026
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