Local foods at the convenience store, and a franchise model to boot

posted 27 May 2008 by Paula | link to this

tags: business, buy local, entrepreneurs, localvore, locavore

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Here’s an absolutely fantastic idea out of Dartmouth, England (shown on the map): a full line of local products carried through a convenience store.

The line of products is called Love the Flavour. Food and Drink Devon, a local food association out of the county of Devon, England, where Dartmouth is located, uses “Love the Flavour” as its brand name to market local producers’ goods. The line will be offered at a Spar shop — evidently like a vastly upscale version of the US’s ubiquitous 7-11, complete with the gas pumps outside and 24/7 hours but which also offers things like (gasp!) fresh produce, meats, and wines.

This is something I have wondered about often. Whenever I need to go to a convenience store, I always hit Lykens Market in Bellefonte (PA), which is like an extended convenience store in that it, too, has a selection of cold cuts, produce, and other things at very reasonable prices, though I doubt if any of it is produced locally (however, the milk is from Schneider’s, which is still in PA). Every time I go there I think about how perfect the place would be for distributing local goods, and that doing so could potentially give it a sales boost since it is competing with a Weis Market just up the road.

What I hadn’t thought of is the possibility of branding the local goods and setting up a franchise specifically targeting convenience stores. This is a stroke of genius on the part of Food and Drink Devon — a branded franchise would consolidate local goods and make them easier to identify, distributing through convenience stores would create a year-round market for producers, and solving the logistics issues would create a local-foods infrastructure resilient enough to compete against big-box grocery stores — especially since the cost of long-distance shipping is already driving some shoppers to seek out local goods that have lower shipping costs. And if distribution occurred through a regional convenience store chain, so much the better for the local economy.

For the full story, see Time to Make a Convenience of Local Produce at redorbit.com.

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