In my opinion the easiest and most obvious way that a grocery store
could incorporate some farm-to-table principles is to just do it in
addition to what they are already doing. Or at the very least replace
some of the stores inventory with farm-to-table merchandise while
still receiving some from the current supplier. The closer and more
reliable the local farm is, the more inventory the store can replace
with local products. Whoever is in charge of marketing in the grocery
store could prominently display the farm-to-table products for the
interested customers. Once the local supplier has proven that they
are able to fill the store's need year round that product can be fully
integrated into the stores to replace a product that was having to be
transported from far away.
According to Massey (2015), some of the benefits of incorporating
farm-to-table into a grocery store would be keeping the money spent
on food inside the local community, generating customer interest in
the new product, and reducing the cost of transportation for the
products. There are also some risks involved in incorporating farm-
to-table in a grocery store. First, it is possible that there could be
increased food safety risks. Massey (2015) says that in a farm-to-
table operation there are a lot of points where the food can become
unsafe to eat. Second, if a grocery store were to go full farm-to-table,
they would only have the products that could be produced locally.
Finally, a drought in the local community could completely disrupt
supply for the grocery store.
The most important communication between local growers and the
grocery store would center around how much demand there is, what
products the local grower could supply, and how much of the
product could the local grower supply. There would also need to be
frank talks about how the local grower complied with food safety
guidelines to reduce the risk of liability if someone gets sick eating
farm-to-table food.
As mentioned above, the main criteria I would use to determine if the
grocery store was going to incorporate any of these farm-to-table
principles would be:
What is the customer demand?
How much product can be supplied?
Is the supply going to remain constant?
Is the local grower conducting a safe operation?
Can we incorporate this cheaply enough that people will buy it?
As long as the answers to the above questions were favorable, I think
that would be enough for me to at least try it for a while and see
what happened.
Massey, Abby. (2015). Farm to Table: Building Local and Regional Food
Systems. SARE Outreach. Retrieved
from https://www.sare.org/resources/farm-to-table-building-local-
and-regional-food-systems/
