to a supermarket entirely run by consumers, filled with self-organized food. There’s no middle man here: we supply and pay each other directly. The shop does not apply any surcharge on the goods, but asks that whenever we take, we need to give something back, be it food, time or packaging.
Left: Hyperburgers started as the graduation thesis and project of Francesca Tambussi for the Social Design master at Design Academy Eindhoven. Photography by Femke Reijerman.
Maybe you’re leaving town and your fridge is full of leftovers or you know a bakery who throws away fresh bread every day. Maybe you grow your own herbs or know a permaculture garden outside town. Maybe you knead and bake your stress away every week. Perhaps you're the master of vegan mayo or the queen of babaganoush. Maybe you are in a foragers club, a dope fermenter, a wise seed collector. Or maybe you know a small producer back home who produces affordable and premium extravirgin olive oil. Maybe you're not into good food, but a lot into good eating. Maybe you collect a lot of jars, keep your wine corks, wash your yoghurt baskets, fold your paper veggie bags. You can bring those too, and we can wash and reuse them.
When the food is not offered for free, we refund each other directly through the hyperburgers platform, or directly with cash.
It's up to you if and how much money you want for the food you offer. If it's leftovers, you might just want to give them for free. If you are supplying the group from a producer you know, you can make a crowdfund, or buy in bulk and then get your money back. If you did put down effort and time, like lets say, in baking a whole day, you can also make a round price that considers your effort, it's up to you, you decide. We pay each other via peer-to-peer payment systems, both digital and analogic.
There’s no middle man here and the shop is non-profit. There’s only one golden principle: whenever we take anything, we need to give something back in a non-monetary form, whether it’s food, time, or packaging.
The amount of the giving does not matter. It can be as small as a cork, a rubber band, a glass jar from your kitchen. It can be a little bit our your time, to wash packaging, to place a new item on the shelf after you take your portion, bottling some oil, or more time, like help cooking. Obviously, it can be as big as participating to a cooking session, starting a new food operation, even developing a new composting machine.
Hyperburgers is not a e-shop. It's a physical space in the city, offered by cultural institutions, such as museums, foundations, co-housings, students campuses, communal kitchens, neighborhood clubs.
The shop never pays rent, but fairly uses vacant spaces in order to provide to citizens a place for a daily and communal kind of sustainability, one that tackles at once the environmental, the economical and the psychological aspects of consumption. In a Hyperburgers, pre-exhisting practices can juxtapose and new protocols can be experimented.