Food systems actors are increasingly turning to stakeholder participation to ‘co-produce’ solutions to challenges. At a workshop on participatory research, blog authors Soujanya Mantravadi and Bramble Gardiner noticed differences in understanding of participatory concepts between their two disciplines - industrial information systems and food justice in communities, respectively. In this blog they consider the implications of those differences for community-industry collaboration and highlight some key practices for working across disciplines.Bramble H Gardiner (they/them) is a community activist and PhD researcher in food justice/systems and social science at the University of Plymouth. Soujanya Mantravadi (she/her) is an engineer and postdoc in industrial systems and supply chains at the University of Cambridge.