Oasis

Access to nutritious, convenient, and affordable food is something that we take for granted. Throughout our busy lives, we often settle for at least one out of the three. The design challenge we tackled addresses areas where people don’t have the luxury to pick either of those options. For the millions of people living in “food deserts,” economic and geographic constraints prohibit them from providing their families with nutritious meals. Our non-profit organization, Oasis, builds and facilitates fresh produce hubs and restaurant spaces within food deserts to combat food insecurity, disrupt an inefficient supply chain, and create an empowering sense of ownership for otherwise marginalized members of the urban population. This week’s research and interviews gave our group a deeper knowledge of this issue and added to our dedication to a future where nutritious food is not a luxury good.

1. Oasis directly impacts low-income families in need.

Oasis will change the lives of women like Sandra, a Haitian woman who lives in Dorchester, Boston. She’s a single mom working two cleaning jobs to feed her son and pay the rent, but it’s just not enough. When she takes her SNAP food stamps to the grocery, she tries to stretch them as far as they’ll go: on low-cost and nonperishable foods that her kid will eat, and that won’t take more than 10 minutes to make at the end of a long day.

Grocery trips are rare; the local corner store is the easiest walk able choice. But Sandra knows that fast food is bad, so she starts to explore her options. Dorchester’s local urban farm requires a $200 subscription fee, so that’s not doable. She visited the Daily Table, but their produce section relies on donations, and yesterday they didn’t have tomatoes or potatoes. Meanwhile, she saw four colors of cauliflower at Whole Foods. Sandra tries visiting the beautiful and healthy “Clover Fast Food”. But the $7 for a pita sandwich is her entire day’s food budget. She misses the taste of Haiti and of home, but utterly lacks the time or money to find comfort in food.

Sandra, like millions of other Americans, effectively lives in a food desert. Food deserts epitomize lack of access, both geographically and financially. They’re a testament to how our supply chain has consistently failed to provide for the most food insecure, so that food deserts exist not only in remote areas where people don’t have cars, but even in urban communities, because options from large retailers to small CSA remain too expensive.

2. Oasis builds complete supply chain ecosystems that solve many of the problems found in food deserts.

Our mission is to bring food-insecure urban families under one roof so they can enjoy fresh, authentic, and affordable meals as one community. With our focus on building integrated community spaces, we emphasize a bottom-up approach. Our Oasis food hubs use food computer technology to grow a variety of fresh, local, and affordable produce. This produce can then be prepared at our on-site re-imagined food bazaar, which empowers local chefs to become small-restaurant owners. Every Oasis will be designed to integrate into already existing infrastructure so that these community hubs will feel familiar to local communities and to reduce costs of implementation.

Every Oasis will consist of three integrated components:

1. A high-volume food computer growing system.
2. A food bazaar with pop-up food stalls surrounding a community dining hall.
3. A grab & go station for take away meals from our refrigerator.

The grow system uses the state-of-the art computer technology that allows local chefs to specify the exact ingredients they’ll need to make for their culturally-specific cuisines. Because the grow hub is within the same building, local chefs can then directly access the fresh produce they’ll need.

Because food stamps are only approved for prepackaged cold meals, the grab & go station provides accessibility for busy families on a budget.

3. Oasis empowers community residents to become business owners.

Oasis creates the programs to assist men like Thomas, a second-generation Vietnamese local resident. Thomas has struggled finding a steady job, but who always loved making people his homemade, Vietnamese recipes. Oasis creates the space so Thomas can finally become a small business owner. Since Oases only hire locally, he is a perfect candidate to run one of the pop up restaurants; cooking up and selling his homemade meals to the community using resources available to him at the Oasis. He also makes meals for the refrigerated meals so that people on SNAP can access the food too.

This opportunity is accessible because we do not require an upfront payment, though he does agree to pay 10% of his gross sales to the organization on a monthly basis. Since he does benefit from the Oasis’ resources, he is trained on how to use and maintain the food computers as part of his job. He also helps sell our low-cost produce to customers who want to buy veggies straight from the food computers.

4. Oasis’ unique value proposition is that it can produce affordable food; it is a complete supply chain.

Food computers optimize production volume by rapidly growing food year-round and eliminating the risk of crop failures, two major limitations of current farms. We lower labor costs by involving chefs with both the growing and cooking of food, which is possible because food computers are partly automated. Most importantly, we cut out the expensive supply chain. The vast majority of food costs are lost to retailers and middlemen. Farmers usually make 9 cents per dollar of food sold to the end customer, which means that 91% of traditional prices can be reclaimed for our farmer-chefs. Although Oasis plans on using established private and public partnerships to cover the significant fixed costs of build Oasis infrastructure, the system is economically self-sufficient.

5. Oasis provides neighborhoods in need with a local institution, a sense of place and ownership, and a global network.

Interested neighbors can come to a hub and learn from our trained staff. There, they can learn about the Food Computer and share that information over our recipe-coder network throughout the US and worldwide. In the future, the oasis will become a neighborhood institution that is self-sustaining. We plan on scaling to establish hubs in all food insecure locations including rural and remote areas.

Editor’s Note: This article was written by a Food + Future coLAB Fellow to share their concepts and experiences from the second week of our January 2016 program, focused on the theme of Access. For more information, please visitfoodfuturecolab.com/access.