Almost 90% of households in St. James Town in Toronto have faced food insecurity. The St. James Town Community Cooperative tackles the longstanding issue of food accessibility in this diverse community, with its OASIS Community Food Hub that provides healthy, culturally appropriate food to those in need.

The OASIS Community Food Hub is developing an online marketplace to increase access to healthy, affordable, culturally appropriate food, including produce sourced from local eco-farmer partners, for low-income households in the community.

Based on the Open Food Network platform, the OASIS Good Food Buying Club has a customer facing online store for members to buy a monthly $50 subscription for healthy food.

The objective of the project is to develop a backend fresh food and staples wholesale utility to source fresh food in bulk from three or four identified wholesalers

This is an innovation prototyping project that will involve several different steps for the learners, including:

- Write the business requirements and functional requirements for the wholesale utility

- Set up the minimum viable wholesale store on an instance of the Open Food Network

- Gather prices from three or four identified wholesalers

- Set up the initial fresh fruit and vegetable product list in the wholesale store, so that bulk purchases can be divided into per unit costs

- Set up the initial staples product list in the wholesale store, so that bulk purchases can be divided into per unit (weight or volume) costs

- Set up the markups and fees to arrive at wholesale selling prices into the retail store

 - Test the operations of the wholesale store over three or four biweekly sales cycles to surface and troubleshoot problems

- Generate reports that demonstrate the gross costs of healthy food relative to the retail subscription prices

- Create documentation for coop members to continue with the wholesale function.

- Create recommendations for the next phase of the project

The final deliverables after a series of sprints are:

1. A minimum viable wholesale store on an instance of the Open Food Network
2. A, report, Documentation and Recommendations for continuing to build out the minimum viable prototype.

Colleaga Impact Collaboratory will provide mentorship, a living laboratory with access to the Open Food Network platform, training on using the platform, price lists where available and guidance for learners during testing,