Open Access was developed by Food & Society at the Aspen Institute, which aims to help food entrepreneurs navigate the many challenges to financing and business ownership in the food sector. With funding from the Walmart Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (the views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the foundations), the Food & Society team created the open-source web code available at no-cost to cities and other organizations to launch portals to help food entrepreneurs in their communities.

The portal structure was inspired by the business portal projects designed and built by Code for America and Long Beach i-team, and the template content was modeled on and drawn from the Franklin County Food Business Portal, Minneapolis Small Business portal, and the Long Beach i-team portal.