The Food Club is a student-led solidarity collective enabling affordable agroecological food access through relational initiatives with local small-scale producers, including a collective purchasing group (G.A.S.), cooking workshops, on-campus markets, and farm visits.
Define the problem/need you are solving or addressing with your project. How does it address the Open Call criteria, such as environmental impact, social engagement, circularity, user experience, resource efficiency, and community-driven solutions?
A historical view of food systems reveals a recurring pattern: global trade policies have favoured transnational corporations while disadvantaging local small-scale farmers. Policies such as the Agreement on Agriculture, TRIPS (Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights), and SPS (Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures) helped drive agricultural industrialisation, with consequences including higher energy use, reduced biodiversity, and depleted nutrient density. This same pattern is mirrored in universities, where public procurement and catering services favour standardised, transnational corporate suppliers and exclude local producers from the supply chain. For young people, especially students, the problem is lived every day as a convenience trap: the most affordable and accessible food is industrial and commoditised, while fresh, high-quality agroecological food remains unaffordable and harder to find in daily life.
Please describe your project, reflecting on the concept, inspiration, materials, technical aspects, methods and process(es).
Inspired by the peasant-led vision of food sovereignty, The Food Club imagines a future in which agroecologically produced food is accessible to all university students, while local producers, most disadvantaged by the dominant food system, regain power over how food is produced and distributed. The project builds a coalition, braiding the capabilities of three actors: students, who organise as a collective through a solidarity purchasing group, pooling their purchasing power within a student food economy that, at the scale of Politecnico di Milano alone, represents a multi-million-euro opportunity; producer networks such as Campagna Amica and Slow Food, contributing distributed producer ecosystems, logistics know-how, and solidarity infrastructures at scale; and the university, which provides infrastructural support for student-led action. Its long-term goal is a non-profit consumer cooperative where members can propose and run their own initiatives, turning students into active participants in a direct relationship with local producers and institutions.
What do you think makes your project innovative compared to the existing efforts and ideas in the field it addresses?
What makes the project innovative is that it treats food access not as a service to deliver, but as a governance relationship to reorganise around food sovereignty. It brings students and disadvantaged local producers into direct, active relation, shifting both from end-points in a system designed by others to co-designers with growing ownership over how food is sourced, distributed, and accessed. Its distinctiveness also lies in braiding capacities that usually remain separate: students’ aggregated purchasing power, producer networks’ coordination and logistics capabilities, and the university’s infrastructural support. Embedded in a university, it can function as an evolving infrastructure through which successive cohorts of students learn, participate, and refine the model over time. If successful, it could be replicated across universities nationally through partners such as Campagna Amica and Slow Food, and internationally through networks such as La Via Campesina.
