Fresh Produce Means Business

Health advocates and doctors are advising the American people to eat more fresh fruit and vegetables. This has increased interest in fresh produce and organically grown food. Local food sales are booming. The longer food spends on the road in transit, the more nutrients and flavor it loses. Therefore, if fresh food is transported shorter distances when using normal transportation modes, the result is better nutritional value and taste. Now, fresh to the American people means locally grown.

Why Should You Go Fresh

Your food business, whether in distribution, in retail sales or tailored to patron dining can take advantage of the qualities of local, fresh foods. For one thing, now when you buy local, you save money because of today’s higher transportation costs due to increased petroleum prices. On the average, locally grown food travels about 57 miles as compared to about 1500 miles for non-local food. And locally grown food tastes better because it’s freshly picked. When you purchase it, you are also not paying for over-processed and expensively packaged food either. Also, since there are a great variety of fruits and vegetables that chain stores don’t carry, you can step into the gap and offer this variety to increase your sales.  

With the rise in food prices, local food has resisted inflation. This is because buying locally reduces food costs because of less transportation expenses, less need for fancy packaging and lower warehousing costs. As a result, these savings can be passed onto your customers. Your customers return the favor by putting money in your pocket.

What is Considered Local Food?

Your customers’ interests in local food may lean towards the more perishable ones. Fruits, vegetables, dairy, cheese, meats, poultry, bread and eggs make up the majority of this list. Your patrons may also have issues with man-made pesticides and chemical preservatives used in perishable foods to protect them from pests and rot. Locally grown food that is free from pesticides and chemicals is more easily available because time is the enemy of food. Less travel means less time in storage for pests to picnic, and less time for food to rot because of transportation distances and problems. 

What is the Downside?

Using local suppliers, however, is not without its difficulties and challenges. Retailers have to employ new merchandizing strategies to stock local products. Since there are in fact hundreds of new products, you’ll need to develop more SKU numbers. Also because most locally grown foods are harvested and produced by small farmers, there are some potential setbacks. Small businesses can lack the more sophisticated pricing, ordering, invoicing and logistics abilities that larger businesses expect. This, in turn, can cause routine purchasing of products from suppliers to become a more complex process. For instance, a small organic farm may not want to do business with a larger grocer because of cash flow issues if it does so.  This may require some adapting on your part. You may need to pay bills faster. Luckily there are e-commerce technologies that are designed just for small businesses that can be employed.

Local food is not a fad. And as the government and insurance companies focus in on less healthy foods; purchasing healthy local food for your customers is now good business. Of course; governments can eventually overregulate small local food dealers and farmers, but no thing in life is gamble free. The question is, is the thing a moneymaker? You know your business best, so check it out.

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