Big brand, local sourcing

posted 17 May 2008 by Paula | link to this

tags: infrastructure, local economies, peak oil

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Something that has interested me a great deal in my localization watching is a growing trend of the big brand sourcing locally. Whole Foods is currently leading the charge with its Local Producer Loan Program, as is Organic Valley, an innovative and highly successful national cooperative of over 1200 organic family farms. In Pennsylvania and New York, Wegmans grocery stores always seem to have a good selection of locally-sourced summertime produce, while that ancient mid-Atlantic standby, Weis Markets, is the exclusive distributor of Pennsylvania Preferred beef.

This seems to me like a really, really good idea. One of the ongoing problems local producers in a lot of areas face is a lack of infrastructure to get their goods to market; there’s plenty of demand, and plenty of supply, but too many obstacles stand in the way of getting these folks together.

Established brands like Whole Foods and Wegmans have the capital and other resources necessary to fill those gaps that might take much longer for smaller operators to fill. Building this infrastructure is a monumental task that desperately needs to happen if we are going to navigate the supply chain disruptions peak oil is already effecting. And while big-box chains offering cheap imports are, for now, raking in profits on the backs of cash-strapped consumers, soon enough these chains are going to face inventory shortages as their just-in-time, global distribution models become too expensive to maintain. Any retail operation plugged into a locally-based supply chain will be far better equipped to continue providing food and other goods to its community in the face of ever-increasing fuel prices — all the more so if the whole chain is localized, or regionalized, including fuel production, particularly biodiesel derived from recycled food wastes.

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