posted 20 May 2008 by Paula | link to this
tags: buy local, entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship, infrastructure, jobs, local food, localvore, locavore
Meredith Levinson, who blogs at the awesomely named Sugar on Snow, has a great post detailing the infrastructure issues she’s running into trying to buy local beef near her home in Arlington, Vermont: The Challenge of Buying Local Beef: No Viable Business Model.
Meredith writes:
The practice of buying local beef will never penetrate the mainstream if consumers have to find a butcher for the meat, figure out a way to transport a side of a cow from the farmer to the butcher, and then have to buy an extra freezer to store all the meat. I realize buying local forces liberal do-gooders like myself to act in alignment with our ideologies, but I’m sorry: Asking average consumers to jump through all of those hoops is absurd. And for the Buy Local movement to become something more than a bumper sticker slogan and passing food fad, it’s got to penetrate mainstream consumers. We’ve got to find a viable and realistic way to get fresh, local meat on Vermonter’s kitchen tables.
While I don’t personally run into this problem here where I live, infrastructure problems are IMO one of the primary reasons the local foods movement remains niche. But these problems also offer great opportunities for anyone looking to drop out of the rat race and earn a living doing something positive.
The kinds of issues Meredith is running into are widespread throughout the local foods movement. Over here are consumers who want local products; over here are producers with local products to sell; and in the middle lies big road trip, or worse, a whole additional level of processing that is unmanageable for the everyday person. What’s needed is for someone to step in and bring the producers’ products together with the consumers, to manage the shipping and/or processing — and that is a business opportunity.
In Meredith’s case, the nearby producer only sells massive quantities of uncut beef. A CSA model could resolve the issue: consumers place their beef orders ahead of time, which get forwarded to a local butcher; the farmer delivers the unprocessed meat to the butcher, who fills the orders; and consumers can pick up their meat order directly from the butcher. Anything that doesn’t get picked up within a certain time period will be frozen. As payment for coordinating all this on a weekly, biweekly or perhaps monthly schedule, the coordinator adds on some percentage to each order. It would also be quite possible to arrange scheduling to coincide with an existing produce CSA, to, in effect, add beef to the available produce shares.
This could potentially circulate a good deal of money through the local economy. The farmer would certainly be able to sell more meat; the butcher would have a fair amount of new work; the coordinator would have some extra money; and sales of produce shares may increase, if it is convenient for customers to buy beef along with the veggies.
Meredith’s other choice is to drive an hour out of her way to buy processed, but frozen, beef. This one would be an even easier extra few bucks for an enterprising person: again, take orders ahead of time; rent a refrigerated van; go pick up the meat before it’s frozen and bring it back to distribute to the purchasers. The costs of renting the van, gas, and the deliverer’s time can all be passed on to the purchasers, and would probably be quite modest for them depending how many of them there among whom to divvy up those costs. What’s nice about this model is that it could be easily managed on a part-time basis and with very little up-front investment.
Either of these possibilities could generate enough money for the coordinator to at least pay for the cost of his/her own beef — which, in these times of incredible food price inflation, could go a very long way.
I see opportunities like this everywhere. My hope is that other entrepreneurs start spotting them too, because rebuilding the local distribution and retail infrastructures that have been decimated these past decades is an important step in making local economies resilient.