Over the last decades a great effort for rural development policies in Sweden has been to find windows of opportunity for the future, to promote new types of enterprises, to support farm and firm diversification, to identify novel business models and in general promote growth. But while many concrete measures have focused on lowering the entry barriers to the market and support the supply side of the rural economy, a glimpse on the emerging technological paradigm, e.g. internet based development and social technologies, indicates that new solutions are possible. In this article we address the following question: Can Alternative Food Networks (AFNs) in combination with social technologies promote rural entrepreneurship and economic growth?