Here’s a word that you won’t find (yet) in any dictionary: SoLeWi. We made it up. But to explain why, we have to start with the word it comes from: SoLaWi: Solidarische Landwirtschaft.
A SoLaWi - solidarity agriculture, known internationally as Community Supported Agriculture or CSA - is a simple, yet radical arrangement: a group of households commits to a farm for a full season, sharing the costs of production in advance. In return, they share the harvest - whatever it turns out to be.
The farmer no longer sells vegetables into an anonymous market that punishes bad weather and rewards overproduction; they grow food for people they know, with a budget that’s already secured. Risk is shared, waste minimised, and the price of food stops being a weekly gamble and becomes what it should be: the cost of production, divided fairly.
The idea has deep roots: from Japanese teikei groups in the 1970s to the Italian GAS (Gruppi di Acquisto Solidale) and the cooperative traditions of Emilia Romagna, through to the SoLaWi network that has spread across Germany since the 1980s. And it’s a simple, yet powerful idea: Commitment is what makes a fair food system work.
Oddkin applies the same principle to the whole food chain: hence, Solidarische Lebensmittelwirtschaft, or “solidarity food economy”, our Community-based Food Ecosystem.
The solidarity runs in every direction: members get artisan food at supermarket-comparable prices, producers get predictable orders and fair pay, and the model itself gets a proof of concept in the middle of Berlin.
The industrial logic behind almost every global supply chain ( standardise, optimise, scale, extract) works well for exactly one party. A SoLeWi is our attempt to design a food business the way a healthy ecosystem works instead: interdependent, seasonal, slow where slowness matters, and honest about its limits.
Curious how the mechanics work in practice? Read How Oddkin's membership works, or come by Danziger Straße 49 and ask.
