Empowering People to use Energy to Access Healthy Nutritious Food

Achieving dietary diversity requires a sufficient variety enabling environment for achieving dietary diversity and meeting essential nutrient requirements becomes more critical than ever.

This is particularly true in areas that have experienced rapid urbanization; although dietary diversity in such areas may have increased – for example, with the availability of more animal-source foods – diets generally also include more processed high-sugar, high-fat, and less nutrient-dense foods than they did prior to the urban and economic transition. 

This, coupled with reduced physical activity as lifestyles become more sedentary, has resulted in a complex nutrition paradigm whereby undernutrition and micronutrient deficiencies coexist with overweight, obesity and diet-related non-communicable diseases (NCDs). (Innovating for Sustainability, Sight & Life Magazine)

Changing this paradigm requires not only individual and household behaviour change but also significant changes across the food supply and value chain to ensure that sufficient, diverse nutritious foods, both fresh and processed, including fortified foods, are available and affordable, throughout different geographies and food environments within any given country.

In resource-poor settings like SA urban townships, dietary diversity is often difficult to achieve due to poor food availability and financial access constraints. As a result, diets in such settings tend to be monotonous, consisting predominantly of starchy staple foods. Although a good source of energy, staples such as cereals, roots and tubers provide only a limited supply of essential (micro) nutrients.

To address this situation we’ve introduced a food access social network, which will make healthy nutritious dense food available at an affordable price in low and medium income urban townships. How?

By forming collaborative partnership with supplies of healthy food products, that partnership will be driven by a deep understanding of unmet nutrition needs, aspiration and preferences of consumers who remain underserved by markets and face limited access to affordable nutritious foods.

Outin Food Access Social Network is a network which connects the community or neighbours through a well establish cultural practise in urban township, whereby food sharing, borrowing and group buying is a common practise among social get-together in urban townships like Stokvels. It’s a social network that demonstrates solidarity and translate the value of food into social capital which has a powerful exchange value in a context of forming informal food safety net which can address malnutrition at household level. 

Food Access Social Network 

The experience of the last 50 years in the food industry has been driven by convenience and taste over health. Moreover, consumer trends and new nutritional knowledge have increased the need to place the health design principle at center stage. The insight that food, not ingredients, is the fundamental unit of nutrition supports this notion. (New Maps for Healthy Dietary Trajectories, Sight & Life Magazine) 

Outin Food Access Social Network and our collaborative partners in the healthy nutritious food sector will be able to empower consumers with healthy food products, a navigation network that will educate consumers (citizens) about what constitute a healthy diversified nutrition dense diet, get citizens (consumers) within targeted urban townships communities to participate and select healthy food products that they prefer to eat from Outin healthy food basket. The network will enable and educate consumers (citizens) to follow a path leading to a high quality healthy nutritious diet.

Collaborative Partnership (Network-centered Innovation to Fuel Food System Change, Sight and life Magazine)

Our collaborative partnership won’t be based mainly on winning market share, but will be based on improving, developing and making healthy nutritious food available in low and middle income urban townships through a localise food access social network at an affordable price.

A key ingredient in aligning economic actors in a collaborative orientation. It transcend market pressures to compete with each other, opting to coexist instead. Where effort was previously dedicated to competing, we help each other in recapturing and enhancing each other's efforts, resulting in higher potential for innovations and greater systemic efficiency in the food industry.

The agriculture and food sector carries inherent risks that may prevent the investment gap between it and other sectors from ever closing. If investors do continue to shy away from the sector, it will be even more critical that we look to new models like network-centered innovation and collaborative equilibrium to support food system innovators.

Outin Collaborative Network

The current innovation space is driven largely by individual players focused on predetermined outcomes that deliver benefits for a few, elite beneficiaries. Innovation has not traditionally focused on improving things; it has largely been about winning in the market. This kind of innovation is inherently limited and limiting: it is not designed to meet emerging global challenges that are by definition too complex to be understood, resourced, and addressed by any one individual actor. 

However, if framed from a broad enough set of perspectives, “innovation” – the process of introducing new ideas products, services, and methods still carries the potential to impact these global challenges. Imagine a network focused on collectively incubating innovations that could help all of humanity.