Economy & Vision › Differences & Comparisons · 5 min read
Transparency at TEIKEI is not an add-on or a marketing term.
It is a way of working.
For us, transparency begins where people can understand how prices are formed, how decisions are made, who bears responsibility, and what share of the final price actually reaches the farms.
Governance, therefore, does not simply mean management or control.
Governance means designing responsibility, roles, and decision-making processes in a way that prevents unnecessary concentrations of power and ensures the collective whole remains sustainable.
Some projects mention transparency in their marketing, but it remains unclear how this transparency is actually achieved.
Perhaps they claim to work fairly.
Perhaps they advertise long-term partnerships.
Perhaps they mention a bonus or highlight a special model.
Yet the critical questions often remain unanswered:
If these questions remain unanswered, no real transparency is created.
Instead, what emerges is merely an image of transparency.
TEIKEI does not see itself as a purely economic enterprise but as a civil society movement that enables a different architecture of economic activity through collective action and new structures.
That is why we work on structures that do not just move food but also connect relationships, responsibility, and knowledge.
We want to make visible how a price is composed.
This includes, for example:
The price should not just appear at the end in the shop.
It should be understandable in its internal logic.
Decision-making processes must also be visible.
For TEIKEI, this includes questions such as:
Governance is coherent when it is not only efficient but also fair and comprehensible.
This includes:
TEIKEI develops pricing models based on shared basic cost contributions and the participation of the overall structures.
The goal is not to tell a good story afterward but to calculate differently from the start:
more clearly, more directly, and with a higher share for the farms.
A project can outwardly claim transparency while remaining unclear about what that actually means.
Let’s take an example:
Two questions immediately arise:
This is precisely where the ambiguity begins.
If 10% of the selling price is meant, then:
Together with the original purchase price of €4,000, this results in:
The FairShare rate would then be:
This is more than 8%, but still far from an equal share of the final price.
If "10% bonus" actually means a markup on the purchase price, the calculation looks like this:
The FairShare rate would then be:
In this case, almost the entire value-added space remains outside agriculture.
If the farm receives not €0.40 per kg but 50% of the final price, the result is:
The difference is significant:
A 50% FairShare rate opens up entirely new possibilities:
For TEIKEI, it is not just about whether a bonus is mentioned somewhere.
The more important question is:
How large is the actual share of the final price that reaches the farms?
And directly following that:
Who decides on the rules of this model—and are these decisions comprehensible?
TEIKEI holds the view that transparency and governance cannot be separated.
Transparency without governance remains superficial.
You may see individual statements, but not the structures behind them.
Governance without transparency quickly becomes the concern of a few.
There may be processes, but no real accountability.
For TEIKEI, both values go hand in hand:
Transparency means that pricing, roles, relationships, and decision-making processes become visible and understandable.
Governance means that these structures are designed so that responsibility is shared, participation is enabled, and concentrations of power are limited.
We do not just want to appear fair.
We want to work in a way that fairness, openness, and cooperation become visible in our actions.
That is why we are building structures:
For us, transparency is not a shop window.
It is a prerequisite for trust.
Governance is not just an administrative term for us.
It is the question of whether a structure is truly sustainably cooperative.
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By Felix Schröder, with support from AI (ChatGPT)
Created on March 23, 2026 · Last updated on March 23, 2026
Questions or feedback? support@teikei.us