Data interoperability for good food systems, everywhere.

The DFC Standard is a data interoperability standard working in the short food systems space that is intentionally designed to support regenerative, agroecological food systems. Our name derives from the original (French) project implementing our standard: the Data Food Consortium.

The DFC Standard is a standardized way to represent the data needed to supply, sell and deliver products through a short supply chain. Requests for and offers of products, customer and purchase orders, and data required by logistics providers to ship products, are all examples of data the DFC Standard supports. By standardizing the representation of this data, we facilitate the exchange of data between platforms and organizations without having to undertake custom development for each exchange of data. This simultaneously increases potential market size and reach for good food growers and producers, whilst reducing the associated administrative burden of working on a platform-by-platform basis. Crucially, there is no one platform to rule them all – the DFC Standard instead fosters diversity at scale, ultimately empowering good food systems to achieve greater resilience in an ever-changing landscape.

The standard ensures the data is represented in specific ways that computers (and software engineers) can understand. The representations can be used to build a database, or stored in other data related structures. They can be mapped onto an existing data model within a platform. Work is ongoing in Australia, Canada, France and the UK implementing the DFC Standard in a variety of contexts and integrating a diverse range of platforms.

Want to be part of the journey? Start here.