Local Growth

MATTHEW ENIS

Local foods have been one of the hottest trends in food retail for the past five years, but shoppers seem to have a range of opinions regarding even the most basic criteria for the term. How far can food travel and still be called “local” for example?

So, what is leading this local feeding frenzy? Have food activists convinced younger consumers that they must buy local for the environment's sake, or are shoppers responding to the recession by making a special effort to keep their dollars within their local economies? Could it be that they just think local foods are fresher and tastier?

These were some of the issues discussed by a panel of experts, including Dave Corsi, vice president of floral and produce operations for Wegmans Food Markets, in the “Keeping it Local: The Pros and Cons of Local Sourcing” at the Produce Marketing Association's annual Fresh Summit convention last month.

“Whether you're a grower, retailer or wholesaler, everyone is talking about local sourcing. The big question is, ‘How do you make this trend work for you?’” asked panel moderator Bob Whitaker, chief science and technology officer for PMA.

Other panelists included Rich Dachman, vice president of produce for Sysco and current PMA vice chairman; Johnna Hepner, director of food safety and technology for PMA; Michael Spinazzola, president of Diversified Restaurant Systems/Subway; and Adam Lytch, operations manager for L&M Companies.

Whitaker began the discussion by briefly describing the origins of the current “locavore” trend.

“It's a movement that, not surprisingly, was started in Berkeley, Calif.,” he said. “That's where we trace it back to.

It really came from a group of people deciding that they would live on local produce for a year.”

Bay-area chef and author Jessica Prentice is credited for coining the term itself in 2005. She and a group of friends, including Sage Van Wing and chef Dede Sampson, were inspired by Gary Paul Nabhan's book “Coming Home to Eat,” in which Nabhan describes living for a year eating only food grown or raised within a 250-mile radius of Phoenix. They decided to try a similar experiment themselves, and to challenge others in the Bay area to do the same — limiting themselves to a 100-mile radius in Northern California. Their project got the attention of San Francisco Chronicle reporter Olivia Wu, who wrote a story for the paper's food section, launching the term into mainstream usage.

Locavorism has not been without its critics, who generally attack it as a holier-than-thou movement that overstates the environmental benefits of eating local, while ignoring the daunting challenges that people in other regions of the U.S. would face if trying a similar experiment. Basically, it's much easier to eat a varied diet of locally produced foods year-round while living in Northern California than it is while living in North Dakota.

But while food activists may have given the trend a name and sparked public conversations about related issues, such as food miles, every produce department manager worth his salt knows that this movement is much more mainstream than that. These straw-man locavores, who spend their winters living on wild game and pickled vegetables out of love for the environment, are not the customers who caused the number of U.S. farmers' markets to more than double during the past decade. They also aren't the reason that Wal-Mart last month announced that it would invest in training and infrastructure that will allow it to source products from small and medium-sized farms local to its stores.

Local food is becoming big business, which means that something about it must appeal to a broad, varied base of consumers. In an effort to summarize that appeal, Whitaker cited a 2009 consumer survey, conducted for PMA by the Hartman Group, Bellevue, Wash. Pointing out some of the report's key findings, Whitaker explained to his audience that: “Local is clearly more about quality than it is sustainability. The primary reasons given for purchasing locally grown? 75% say to support their local community. It's where I live, I want to support it, especially during these hard economic times.”

Survey respondents were allowed to give as many answers to the “why buy local” question as they wanted. In addition to the 75% who said they wanted to support their community, 65% said they think local produce tastes better, and 62% said food grown closer to them is fresher. About half of respondents — 47% — said that they bought local because they view local foods as more environmentally friendly. And, possibly in a response to the series of massive foodborne illness outbreaks during the past five years, 44% said they are more confident in the safety of local foods. Twenty-nine percent said they liked having a connection to their local farmers.

Supporting the local community also has a strong appeal for many retailers.

“In our areas, you can get up in the morning and drive to work and pass five or six farmers' markets or farm stands,” on the way, noted Corsi. “You also see a heavy increase in CSAs [Community Supported Agriculture programs] … That's why it's important to us — it's important to our customers. At the same time, our philosophy and one of our values is supporting the communities that we serve.”

Corsi later added that Wegmans had conducted a survey of its own customers, who said that they viewed local produce as produce grown by their neighbors in upstate New York. Others said that locally grown meant fresher and more flavorful. That perception is strong even when it is debatable, Corsi said. For example, sometimes a rainy spring will lead to a bland crop of local strawberries, but it doesn't seem to matter, he explained.

Shoppers also place a lot of trust in the term “local.” Maybe even an undue amount of trust. Corsi noted that some of his survey respondents seemed to think that “local” always means fewer pesticides or fungicides, and many viewed local foods as fundamentally safer than conventional foods.

“A local grower, who is within a short distance of where [customers] live, has a heavy trust factor,” Corsi said.

Wegmans has had relationships with many of its local farmers since long before this trend had a name. The company has set safety standards for those growers, and has even helped many pay for third-party audits to ensure those safety standards are upheld. But, Corsi and other panelists agreed that this perception of safety was not something to be exploited.

“In today's world, it's easy to [use] the perception in order to profit from it, even though it may or may not be accurate,” said Dachman. “I think we really need to be careful as an industry that we don't take advantage of the consumer by allowing them to believe things that may or may not be true.”

Education and transparency are two keys to sustaining this trend in supermarkets and conventional foodservice operations. At its core, the appeal of the local food movement is really that it puts a face, rather than a brand, behind a product. Shoppers may be idealizing the term to some extent, but they essentially see a farmer when they see the word local, and they believe this is a person they can trust.

Whether produce departments opt to use local foods to educate their shoppers about seasonality, or to host meet-and-greets with local farmers, or to disabuse customers of the notion that local foods can be equated to organic foods, maintaining that trust will require retailers to be specific about how local is defined at their stores, and transparent with regard to where their local products are sourced.