Posts Tagged: Local Food

Thoughts on Convenience and Middlemen

As a rancher, marketing convenience has a very different meaning for me.  A convenient market, for me, means a place where I can sell a high volume of product, at retail prices (or close to it), with minimal time commitment on my part.  Convenience, by my definition, has a great deal to do with efficiency.  As a rancher, I can't afford to go to more than one or two farmers markets per week – let alone seven!

In many parts of the country, communities have turned to the concept of a food hub as a way to increase marketing efficiency for producers and convenience for consumers.  In the food hub model, producers can sell higher volumes and close-to-retail prices to the food hub.  The hub then distributes the produce to chefs, retailers, and even directly to consumers.  The Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF) says,

“Many stakeholders in local food systems work have looked to the emergence of food hubs as the missing infrastructural link that will enable greater access to markets for small farmers and greater access to fresh, local food for communities. The USDA definition of a food hub is a “business or organization that actively manages the aggregation, distribution, and marketing of source-identified food products primarily from local and regional producers to strengthen their ability to satisfy wholesale, retail, and institutional demand.”[1]

From my perspective, a food hub operates like a locally-focused produce distributor – like a middleman that facilitates the sale of locally grown fruits, vegetables, meats, etc. within a community or region.

Food hubs differ from conventional distribution middlemen, in my opinion, primarily by lack of a profit motive.  Food hubs – at least those with which I'm familiar – are motivated by a desire to serve community needs (e.g., access to healthy, local food and increased viability of local small farms), rather than by a desire to generate profit.  Like many farmers, however, food hubs often discover that profit is vital to their survival – without profit, a food hub can't pay overhead expenses, let alone the farmers and ranchers it supposed to serve.  At the other end of the supply chain, food hubs can't serve community customers if they aren't economically sustainable.

CAFF puts it like this:

“As a result of our efforts over the last decade, CAFF concludes that new, stand-alone facilities and aggregation hubs, unless farmer owned and operated, are not viable enterprises in California. These third party food hubs add on an extra layer of costs to the supply chain, duplicate existing efforts/infrastructure, and struggle financially without subsidy. In our view, a more effective strategy for local food system development is achieved not by establishing a stand-alone food hub as described above, but rather by working collaboratively to modify existing infrastructure and fostering supply chain values among a broad set of food system stakeholders while also educating the community about local food and engaging them in the movement. Ultimately, CAFF hopes that our findings and experience will help advance the theory and practice of local food system development and inform future decision-making processes around the need for new food hubs in California.”[2]

Food hubs can be subsidized in various ways.  Growers can donate time and facilities to these hubs, or they can take lower prices or deferred payments.  Similarly customers can pay higher prices, or likewise donate time and facilities.  In the long run, however, such subsidies are not sustainable.

What's the answer, then, to this conundrum?  How do we match the needs of local consumers (for markets that are time- and location-convenient) with the needs of farmers and ranchers (for markets that are efficient and fair in terms of price and volume)?  As CAFF suggests, perhaps we need to work within the existing aggregation and distribution infrastructure.  In this scenario, consumer demand for locally grown food would carry back through the supply chain, from the retailer to the distributor to the producer.  At the same time, a small family farm's need for higher prices could carry through this same set of middlemen to the retailer (and ultimately to the consumer).   For me, the key to these issues is that we need to discuss our local food system as a community.  Too often, farmers talk amongst themselves without including the rest of the food system.  Sometimes (believe it or not!), we even complain that profiteering in the processing, distribution or retail sectors comes at our expense as farmers!  Similarly, local food advocates often leave the idea of profit (within any segment of the system) out of their discussions.  It's time we all talked together!

[1] “Making the Invisible Visible: Looking Back at Fifteen Years of Local Food Distribution Solutions (October 2014), p. 5.

[2] Ibid., p. 3.

Mandarin Festival Local Food Dot Survey Results

The Mountain Mandarin Festival wrapped up on Sunday, amidst sun and happy shoppers.  Though it rained like heck on Saturday, the Festival nevertheless saw a tremendous turnout.  Overall, the Festival was a huge success.

At the UCCE booth, we held tastings of PlacerGrown fruit, and conducted a simple Local Food Dot Survey.  The shoppers leapt at the chance to taste Fuyu persimmons, Fuji apples, Yali and Okusankicki Pears. 

There were over 300 responses for The Dot Survey, which yielded insightful results.  Full results can be seen on the table below, but here are some of the more thought-provoking highlights:

-          52.9% of respondents answered that they purchased locally grown fruits and veggies weekly.

-          49.2% of respondents answered that they purchased these fruits and veggies at a farmers’ market.

-          47.7% cited convenience as the main factor keeping them from purchasing more locally grown fruits and veggies

-          47.7% defined “local” as “From my county and adjacent counties.”

One main point to keep in mind is that the shoppers at the Mountain Mandarin Festival likely do not represent shoppers in general.  Consider that this festival is billed around locally grown mandarins, add in the non-stop rain on Saturday, and we can surmise that these shoppers are more likely than most to purchase locally grown products.  This is evidenced by the fact that 52.9% said they purchased locally grown fruits and veggies weekly, and 49.2% responded that they purchased these fruits and veggies at a farmers’ market. 

That said, 47.7% still responded that convenience (or lack thereof) was the major factor keeping them from purchasing more locally grown fruits and vegetables.  Based on these results, ease-of-access is paramount to growing the local food movement.  Armed with this data, we will need to consider how to make local food, and the markets that offer it, more readily accessible and convenient. 

One of the more interesting insights cannot be extrapolated from the data on the table.  While speaking with people over the weekend, we noticed that some shoppers believe that any food purchased at a local grocery store (such as Briar Patch Co-op) is “local”.  For instance, one respondent told me that she only purchased locally produced fruits and veggies.  I then asked her if she ate bananas.  She replied that she did.  I then pointed out that bananas are not grown locally, but she countered that they are from Briar Patch.  This was one example of confusion between “locally grown fruits and veggies”, and a “local grocery store.”  I do not know how prevalent this confusion is in our society, but it is something to consider.   The other side of the coin would be that it does not matter, and that as long as people are shopping at a store like Briar Patch, they are inevitably going to run into local produce, so we should not discourage those types of shopping habits. 

All in all, the Local Food Dot Survey gave insight into what we can do to make sure that, in the future, more people are making weekly purchases of locally grown fruits and vegetables.

Stuck in the Middle

Local food and small-scale farming seem to fit hand-in-glove - folks interested in locally grown food want to buy from small, family-owned farms that are part of the community.  Small-scale farmers want (and need) to sell directly to consumers - selling to the end user eliminates the need for a "middleman" who takes a cut of the value of a farm product.  While I've considered these issues in this space previously, I'm increasingly convinced that the middle - that space between micro-scale and large-scale farming - is a difficult place to be.

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