Giovanni, Enzo, Roberta, Andrea, Michele, Gianluca, Graziella, You.

DATA FOR FOOD is designed to make sure that in the food supply chain there are only winners and never losers, in an ethical and sustainable way. To achieve this, the "engine" that powers DFF is neutral toward all actors, from small producers to large industries, from individual consumers to buying groups.

How do we plan to accomplish this? The answer is as simple as the question is complex: by making sure that every need of every node in the food supply chain is clear, transparent and explicit. We firmly believe that from respecting everyone's reasons and needs can come virtuous behavior from which, circularly, everyone gets a fair return.

Giovanni is a small farmer. He has always worked since he was young on the family farm using traditional methods, and now that the farm is on his shoulders he feels the need and sees the opportunity to take a leap of modernization, while still wanting to remain in the tradition.

Giovanni produces fruits and vegetables in volumes that guarantee his company adequate operating margins only if he can sell his produce at a fair price, a price he is not always able to obtain because distributors are willing to pay that price only for first-grade produce in terms of size and appearance.

The fact is that in this way Giovanni manages to sell only 40 to 50 percent of his production, because much of his product is excellent in quality and healthiness but aesthetically imperfect and variable in size. The rest effectively goes to waste.

It is no better with a modest production of ancient fruits, including apples, pears and peaches, which large retailers do not accept because they are "non-standard" varieties and the quantity produced is only a few hundred kilos.

Enzo and Roberta love food and eating consciously for them and their son Andrea, who is now 8 years old and eats everything with an appetite.

They are as careful about the cost of groceries as they are about the quality of what they buy. They love meat but consume little of it and always of high quality, preferring by choice to consume a lot of fruits, vegetables, legumes and grains.

They shop at the market once a week. To get to the nearest one they have to travel several kilometers in the city, and they are always looking for seasonal, very fresh and varied produce. While freshness is guaranteed by weekly shopping at the market, this is not always the case for variety: even on the market stalls, even if farmers own the stall, they find more or less always the same products found in supermarkets.

User personas are one of the most powerful tools used in design processes, particularly in UX design.

Personas are used to create archetypes of users with respect to their needs and use cases. At DATA FOR FOOD, we created a special type of personas that we called "Food Personas".

We have already codified a good number of them and are continuing to do so with the active collaboration of our stakeholders.

Precisely because DATA FOR FOOD is a collaborative platform, the help of stakeholders is invaluable and allows us to refine through successive iterations the models that are the foundation of the algorithms that our AI will use for the application platform.