What deeper problem are you addressing?
In Switzerland, nearly 90% of people say they want to consume healthy, seasonal, and locally produced food, yet only slightly more than half of the food consumed is actually produced locally. This gap reveals a deep systemic problem: the current food system does not provide sufficient consumer incentives to match the economic realities of local agriculture. As a result, small and medium-sized farms face increasing pressure from globalized supply chains, concentrated retail markets, and price competition.This disconnect creates several reinforcing challenges. First, local producers struggle to capture sufficient value from their products, especially through direct sales and short supply chains. Second, consumers often default to conventional purchasing channels because they are more convenient, familiar, or economically attractive. Third, financial value generated through food purchases frequently leaves local communities and agricultural regions, weakening regional resilience and reducing the economic viability of sustainable farming. The consequence is a growing disconnect between rural production areas and urban consumers, threatening not only farm livelihoods but also the broader public goods that local agriculture provides, including landscape stewardship, biodiversity preservation, food sovereignty, and climate resilience.
Which habits or practices do you want to change — and how?
We want to change both how people buy food and how much direct sales benefit farmers. Although many consumers value local, seasonal, and sustainably produced products, convenience and price often lead them to purchase through conventional retail channels and so called “cheaper products” that leave environmental and social damages. Our goal is to create incentives to make buying local a regular habit rather than an occasional conscious choice. This can be done by the use of a complementary currency specially designed to support local producers while making them more affordable to consumers. By the creation of the Franc Paysan (FP) we started a first phase of a wider project for a future society. Because farmers can sell directly to consumers, they retain a larger margin than through conventional distribution channels. By increasing the volume and frequency of direct purchases, we help improve farm profitability, reduces dependence on intermediaries, and creates more stable local revenue streams for farmers and also for the region as a whole.
The Franc Paysan draws advantages both from complementary currencies and vouchers systems. Issued by our association, the FP is sold to companies and local authorities (1 FP = 1 CHF). Companies distribute FP to employees as a fringe benefit (“Lohnnebenleistungen” or “prestations salariales accessoires”), while municipalities propose them to residents through subsidized schemes for example for climate bonus or energy efficiency. In both cases, recipients will typically receive around 20% of additional purchasing power (by skipping salary charges in the former and through subvention for the later). Recipients can then spend their FP within our growing network of local farmers (around 90 members at the time of writing), generating new customers and additional direct-sale revenue for producers. Farmers can then either reuse their FP within the network or convert them back into CHF. To make our offering more sustainable and build the
What do you want to work on during the booster — and what do you want to find out?
During the booster, we want to explore and validate the most effective pathways for expanding the Franc Paysan into urban areas. While the model has already demonstrated strong traction among farmers, consumers, companies, and municipalities, we now need to understand which partnerships, incentives, membership and deployment strategies can make local food purchasing a mainstream habit in cities. To do so, we will conduct stakeholder interviews (WorkStream 1), explore different urban adoption models, like municipality-driven, employer-driven, community-driven, or social inclusion approaches (WS2), and organize co-design workshops with key urban food system stakeholders (WS3).
Our main assumption is that economic incentives can effectively shift consumer behavior toward local food when combined with a sufficiently dense and attractive network of participating businesses. We also assume that municipalities and employers are willing to play an active role in financing or distributing Francs Paysans, and that urban merchants are attracted by our offering without diluting the initiative’s agricultural mission. During the booster, we want to test these assumptions and identify which combination of partners and incentives has the potential to generate the greatest benefits for farmers, the highest user/member adoption, and the strongest potential for long-term scaling. In parallel, the project will allow us to build a network of potential future partners in cities.