All love thy Naaber

Here we go

Our story begins here in Brussels at Pullman Hotel. It's a beautiful spring Monday afternoon and we're waiting for the beginning of the FIWARE Developers Week (03/2015). This establishment is really nice. Just to give you the gist of it, the lounge we're sitting in has coasters more refined and elegant than the interior of my car. The whole scenery smells of entrepreneurship. People sitting at adjacent tables are wearing fine suits and expensive shirts while having meetings and looking smart. Everything brings to mind the term big business.

And big business it is. At least for us. I'm reading the mineral contents of BRU spring water we ordered, Paavo is having his black coffee with famous Belgian chocolate. I steal a little bit of his candy. It's really good and pretty soon I find many similarities in its taste and our journey — not too bitter, not too sweet.

What brought us here? Why is this important? About a month ago our tiny little start-up, all love thy Naaber, received news we couldn't believe for weeks to come. The ball got rolling last December when we sent a proposal to the FInish-Project to apply for funding. It was a project we'd been working on since the beginning of summer. Neither of us had written any large-scale projects before. And the whole process came close to becoming a fiasco due to bad timing and our underestimation of the challenge. Somehow we pulled through and managed to prepare everything necessary for the application on time.

Eating naturally grown food has always seemed like the right thing to do and so we finally started to do something about it ourselves. We thought eating healthy needs to be more accessible and convenient. Price and delivery options are important. Economical benefits of local food production and consumption is a goal we need to start working towards.

Our platform, naaber.io, offers free operating software for small and medium sized entrepreneurs (SMEs) like farmers, local shops, cafes, restaurants and such. We help them to cooperate with tiny (or big) delivery companies to socially organize transport for orders.

Goodies

All this is necessary to gather under one roof so that consumers like you and me can then go to naaber.market — a web-shop where you can buy food from producers who operate through naaber.io. We consolidate the contents of your shopping cart so you don't have to worry about how your cheese comes from Saaremaa, potatoes from Jõgeva and honey from Võru. Naaber takes care of all the logistics and delivers the food to you by different shipping choices:

• courier at your door
• delivery location like organic market or a nearby cafe
• nearest passively-cooled automatic food box delivery machine.

Start thinking of parcel machines from SmartPost, Itella, or Omniva, but for food so you don't have to stay in line at retail chain stores for hours. We make this happen! It's also important to note that we enable you to order directly from small producers for a better price. Instead of being a typical dealer or in-between broker, Naaber acts as a payment institution who does not interfere with pricing. We apply a small transaction fee to your purchases while lowering the total cost of your food by taking retailers out of the equation. As you may know, retail chains apply a profit margin of 30-40%, in many cases even more.

That's an extremely short version of what we've been working on for the past year. And you've probably already figured it out, we got the money! That's what brought us to Brussels. We had a wonderful week of learning about cloud computing and making business connections across Europe. We're ever so grateful to the wonderful people from Maainfo Keskus who took care of our accommodation. In cooperation with them we’ll be highlighting other ongoing agricultural and social projects in Europe that we had a chance to learn about in Brussels. Lot's of exciting things happening!

Little pat on the back

Naaber has many challenges ahead which we plan to share with you. Subscribe to our blog or follow us on our Twitter page (@LoveThyNaaber) and through our Facebook page to stay updated. And we promise not to be very lazy about writing these posts. We wish you stay with us through thick and thin. We've got a fascinating journey ahead. Like that Belgian chocolate — not too bitter, not too sweet.