One system instead of five
Online orders, the shop counter, the market stall and the payments — the same stock, the same numbers, the same day's trading.
Technology for the people who feed us
Growing it is hard enough.
Selling it shouldn't be.
Shared Acre is a not-for-profit association being established in Canberra. We build and run the software and connected hardware that a food business with a shopfront, a stall and online orders needs — the selling, the payments and the whole day's trading in one place — tailored to your business with the help of AI.
Right now, it's a calculator, a paper notebook, a set of scales that doesn't talk to anything, and payment tools that live in a separate world from the online orders.
The big platforms are built to serve a hundred stores, not one — never a family farm or a market stall. Small food businesses stack add-ons until the bill costs more than the problem did, paying enterprise money for a system that doesn't understand what they sell. No amount of extra software fixes a platform built to answer to shareholders instead of the businesses running on it. It's why Shared Acre is being set up as an association rather than a startup.
Where we're up to
- Product
- Working, in use
- Pilot
- First site live and trading
- Funding
- Seeking grant funding
- Structure
- Not-for-profit association, being established in the ACT
- Region
- ACT and nearby New South Wales to begin with
What we're building
Tailored with AI
We use AI to shape the platform around each business — your products, your pricing, the way you sell — at a cost a small business can carry.
Your gear, where we can
We connect the scale, printer or terminal you already own to the till where we can — and smart scales down the track. Some gear won't talk to anything, and we'll tell you which.
We're still working out how the service and its pricing are best put together, and we'd rather get that right with a few businesses than publish it early. If you tell us how you trade, you'll help shape it.
Here's a sneak peek
Real screens, set up for an example business. It sells meat because our first site does; the same system runs a market garden or a Saturday stall.
Storefront
Your shop, online
The shop is built to your brand, not ours — your name, your colours, your photographs, laid out the way your business sells. Customers order one-off or take repeat boxes on subscription, which they can pause, skip or change themselves, and everything lands in the same system the counter runs on.
Checkout
Checkout, delivery and payment
Home delivery or farm-gate pickup, promo codes at the cart, and card payment through Stripe — Apple Pay and Google Pay included.
Admin
The whole day in one place
Orders, stock, customers and the takings across every store, stall and market day. Picking slips for delivery runs, reporting by product, staff or channel over any date range, and the numbers reconcile out to Xero.
Point of sale
A till at the counter and the stall
The register runs on the tablet you already have, against the same stock as the website — rewards members, one-tap discounts, and cash or card tenders. Every sale, discount, refund and price override is recorded against the person who made it, so an owner can see what happened on a shift they were not there for.
The scale
Your scale talks to the till
Put the produce on the scale and the weight lands on the sale, priced — nothing retyped. We reuse the hardware you already own wherever we can: where a scale has no way to talk to a till, we use AI to design a small custom module that gives it Bluetooth. Not every device can be brought across, and we will tell you which of yours cannot.
Who we're for
- Family farms and primary producers
- Farmers market stallholders
- Market gardeners selling vegetables direct — farm gate, box orders, the Saturday stall
- Small processors close to the farm gate — a butcher with two shops, say
- Businesses moving produce from the paddock to the person who eats it
Not cafés, restaurants or food service buying finished product. Not supermarkets or large retailers running their own systems.
We say the no out loud. Knowing exactly who we serve is the point of the organisation, not a limitation of it.
Owned by no one, built for the businesses that use it.
Shared Acre is being formed as a not-for-profit association rather than a company. There are no shareholders and no investors — surpluses go back into the work — and the system is being built alongside the businesses that will run on it.
Tell us how your business trades.
Whether you're a producer wanting to know if this could work for you, someone who funds this kind of work, or a market organiser with members who'd want to hear about it — write a line and we'll come back to you.
- hello@sharedacre.org
- Based in
- Canberra, ACT
- Reply
- Usually within a couple of days, from a person
What happens next
- We read it ourselves. There is no queue and no bot.
- We reply with what we think, or with the fact that we cannot help you yet.
- If it looks like a fit, we work through how you trade before proposing anything.