Grocery Update Volume 2, #14: The Future Of Local Food.

Moving Past Peak Local.

The Future Of Local Food.

By Errol Schweizer, Grocery Nerd.

It’s mid summer at farmer’s markets in the temperate zones of the Northern hemisphere. Peak local. Everything is local and delicious. Pies, cookies, tamales, empanadas, pierogies, pickles, sauerkraut, kimchi, tempeh. Beef, pork, chicken, lamb, goat, venison. Peaches, berries, green, tomatoes, okra, apples, various oversized cucurbits and tubers. Sometimes organic, occasionally biodynamic. Maybe “naturally” grown, whatever that means. Or lightly misted with glyphosate, atrazine or paraquat. Gotta keep the dandelions and Palmer’s Amaranth at bay. Aerial sprayed locally.

Locally grown, locally handmade, locally produced, locally local. Local, local, local. Like an Alice Waters-Michael Pollan-Bay Area fever dream. No dilemmas for these omnivores. Solutionist solutions. Problems solved, food system fixed. Local farmer’s markets for the win. Everyone loves farmer’s markets. I do too.

But, alas, Alice, my friends, farmer’s markets are not the food system. All in, they account for less than 1% of the sales annually tallied by the grocery industry writ large.

Grocery is Big Food. Industrially produced. It is not pretty, but grocery feeds the people. Farmer’s markets, they are wonderful, but they are a cute sideshow, a hobby, a light snack. Not the supply chain’s main course. So if you want to talk about local food, how and where it’s grown, owned, produced, marketed and allocated, you need to talk about grocery retail, it’s context and externalized costs and the broader challenges of transparent and ethical supply chains in the modern era of crisis. Whew. That’s a lot to unpack.

The Local In Grocery.

Grocers have a weird relationship with local foods. They like to talk about it, market themselves as marketing local, selling local, supporting local. But local isn’t really their core business model, their bread and butter, so to speak.

Grocery stores were planned, designed, built out for the industrial production, processing and distribution of mass market foods, stuff that is grown at scale, chemical intensively, homogenously, consistently, ubiquitously, conveniently, everywhere, all the time. The promise of the industrial food system, cemented in the post-war years as the sunk costs of billions of dollars of privately-owned, federally subsidized processing infrastructure that fed the troops overseas was repurposed for civilian use, like a G.I. Bill for your pantry, transforming the food supply into a permanent wartime food system, calorie dense, semi-perishable, processed and packaged.

Coupled with said G.I. Bill and expanded home ownership, the federal highway system, federally subsidized suburbanization and deindustrialization of urban centers, modern refrigeration and supply chain technologies, a ready labor force, a stable climate, a growing economy and the rapid introduction of new agricultural technologies and inputs, grocery stores were primed and ready to feed the people.

Stuff that existed before the war but was not yet as popularly accessible, such as packaged ice cream, boxed mac ‘n cheese, TV dinners, canned beer, cookies, crackers, breakfast cereals, ketchup, sandwich meats, tinned meats and seafood, plus the same chilled lettuce, apples and berries all year round.

Food for the people. A modern miracle. Food from nowhere. Abundant, cheap and convenient, anonymous and commoditized, processed and boxed, bagged, stacked and stuffed with all manner of foodstuffs that we were raised on, have come to know, love, crave, and more recently, be quite concerned about. The opposite of local, the cuddly, holistic, meaningful food that consumers colloquially understand and expect local food marketing to intend and execute on.

Industrial food still feeds the world, or at least the U.S. The external costs, however, are anything but cuddly or holistic. Over a trillion dollars in annual health care costs, ultra processed foods linked to pretty much every major non-communicable disease. Pollution in waterways, the hypoxic dead zone in the Gulf the size of New Jersey, the soil loss, farmworker exploitation and deportations, the 12% of consumers who consume 50% of meat, the high prices driven by the market concentration and profiteering of Big Food processing conglomerates and retailers and, more recently, the introduction of some of the dumbest tariffs ever, plus more frequent out of stocks and supply chain disruptions from climate change, pandemics, labor strife, more and more repression of migrant workers and even legal immigrants working in the food sector. Industrial food, no longer cheap, convenient or ubiquitous. So fragile.

Is local food the answer?

Well, that depends.

For most retailers, in the context of everything else they need to do to keep the lights and customers coming back, local food feels like a niche. A nice to have. A marketing vehicle for customer attention and retention. A feel good play.

Hang up those posters of the local fisherfolk and rancher and lettuce and potato grower, hopefully while their products are on shelf, in stock and freshly rotated. Mark them up above the cost of doing business, maybe glean some extra pennies to make up for all that milk and eggs and processed snack foods they have to sell at rock bottom prices, below margin targets, in order to compete with the likes of Aldi and the Bentonville Gang. Then try not to run out of stock and replace the locals with something cheaper, more profitable, less high touch and cuddly.

Somehow, though, local food is here to stay, at least as this high touch, highly seasonal marketing vehicle. In this sense, local food is not a serious competitor to the industrial supply chain. It can play nice with the status quo. Not a threat. Maybe a local vendor gains enough distribution or raises enough capital to get slotted in a big wholesaler like UNFI of C&S. It is not a game changer or disruptor. This is a nice to have, at least for now, while things keep chugging along and we are still between pandemics and semi-annual thousand year flood and wildfire events. No crisis today.

But twenty odd years after The Omnivore’s Dilemma’s compelling exhortations and expositions on corn monocultures, industrial organic and the oddball paranoia of Joel Salatin, the food system is objectively worse for wear. Sure, there have been significant efforts to reform the industrial supply chain, with Non-GMO verification, more plant-based foods, better food traceability requirements, relatively decent organic standards, as well as a hodge podge of animal welfare, sustainable seafood and the occasional fair labor initiatives. Not feeding the world just yet, but making the world feel better about food.

Meanwhile, ultra processed foods still account for 60 or 70% of U.S. calories, depending on the study. The top 5 retailers are over 60% market share. Dozens of categories are dominated by 3 or 4 major brands. And the rapid growth of the store brand private label sector to over $270 billion annually outsells “local” by a factor of at least 10, perhaps 20 to 1.

Private label is the opposite of local. Food from nowhere, somehow everywhere. Proprietary, anonymous, except for the retailer’s brand name, homogenous, ubiquitous, and still so oddly cheap, usually because retailers balance the low margins on private label with higher markups and higher prices on everything else, including, yep, those cuddly local products. At the end of the day, all grocery prices roll into the blended margin that keeps the lights on, pays for wages and benefits and pays out investors, and local does not pay those bills.

And most grocers, even most discounters and some mass merchants, are trying to market more responsibly produced products to that subset of the population who wants to know where their food came from, and cares about how it was made to the extent they can afford such things. But grocers still need such products to be homogenous, available consistently and priced reasonably, all things that the industrial supply chain needs to function.

So even the supply chain reforms like organic and Non-GMO and fair trade, the “BFY” sector driving overall industry growth, all still must fit into this framework, because the grocers are the last stop on the supply chain, the last mile to the end consumers, who are finnicky, flighty and polygamous in their shopping habits, even in what local loyalties they have.

And local itself is a funny thing. It doesn’t guarantee anything, even actually being local. There are no regulations about how to market it, kind of like “all-natural”. It’s the wild west. Local means it can still be sprayed with toxic crap, still be picked by exploited migrants, still inhumanely slaughtered, still ruinous to the Earth, just on a smaller scale. Small is not beautiful. It’s just small.

But Local is what the people want.

In that case, here are the rules of local marketing to make that effort easier, more transparent and maybe a bit less misleading, as well as some out of pocket ideas of moving beyond shallow local marketing and leveraging that legitimate interest into something more compelling, holistic and sustainable.

First, define local.

There is no consistent definition for retailers. What area does this pertain to? In state? Metro region? Tri-state area? Not from Mexico or Canada? Does it mean grown, made, or just owned locally? Just a cubicle at the WeWork space downtown? Retailers fumble this all the time and the result is a mess of contradictions and claims on shelf, making it look like a load of BS, ultimately hurting the legit businesses and operations in the area trying to market their products. Define local consistently and transparently. It is so easy. And so rare.

Next, staff up.

Want to buy and sell local foods? Hire and train the folks to do that, within the merchandising and supply chain organization with a clear mandate on how to integrate local foods into category management, promotions, marketing and plannogramming processes. And make those staff full time, with career advancement opportunities, that are not the first ones to get fired during layoffs or downturns, but strategic personnel with core importance to the company direction. Not social workers for brands, not just “foragers” who live outside the normal business cycles and therefore are not taken seriously. So take local seriously.

Locally grown.

This is an easy one. Depending on where you are and what season it is, this one becomes more relevant throughout the year. It’s easy to market. Put a sign up, a poster, a 4-up or a 2-up with pictures, a sentence or two of content. If possible, put a label or tag on the products indicating the local provenance. It’s a layup.

Co-ops and indies do this the best. Kimberton Whole Foods in Pennsylvania works closely with local producers all year round. Local, organic and IPM (integrated pest management) apples in the late summer and fall. Organic carrots and veggies from Lancaster Farmer’s Co-op most of the year, various other locally grown fruits and veggies from nearby New Jersey, as well as a wide selection of humanely raised eggs and dairy products from the surrounding counties, with detailed signage explaining everything. Not always cheap, but a truer cost than the mass marketed stuff.

Co-ops like Three Rivers in Knoxville and Viroqua in Wisconsin likewise dig into their local foodscapes with granular and specific messaging of what was grown where and by whom, sometimes quite close by and picked very recently. Three Rivers even distinguishes between “regionally” and “bioregionally” grown products, but does not explain what that means. It sounds cool though. And the signs always match up to the products and when those items run out, the signs come down or are replaced.

Dorignac’s and Langenstein’s in Metairie sell plenty of conventional local produce in season, like massive pumpkins and sweet potatoes from Louisiana farmers, as well as citrus and other fruits. With a mild climate, good soil and a lot of rain, plus or minus the occasional hurricane, the home state of populist Huey Long is an abundant food producer. Cajun/creole is one of the greatest cuisines in the world and Louisiana already has some of the best local and indie grocers.

Honey is a slam dunk category for local sourcing. It is so easy to find locally made honey in the U.S., at least while the pollinators haven’t died off yet. Colony collapse disorder is still a very real threat. But in the meantime, lots of great local honey out there, as sweet as can be. Indies and co-ops especially do a great job on marketing local honey, but even mass merchants will sometimes include local honey in their local mishmash endcaps (more on that in a moment).

HEB has a huge local supply chain, if you can consider Texas, a nation state, a subcontinent, even a state of mind, to be one local market. HEB sources produce from the Rio Grande Valley just about all year round, as well as other areas of the state on a seasonal basis, like tender okra from Bexar or Cameron counties. Many of the eggs they sell are from farms in Texas, although they are sourcing at a much larger scale than a Kimberton and will sell cage free eggs as well as battery-raised eggs in styrofoam cartons as local.

Wheatsville Co-op in Austin markets pasture raised and regenerative meats from Richardson Farms, barely 50 miles away from the store. Weis Markets in PA has built its own beef supply chain from small farms nearby (they don’t call them ranches so far east).

Kroger occasionally sells local produce, but the signs stay up even when the products run out. Awkward. Other grocers don’t even try. Natural Grocers produce is 100% organic, but doesn’t market local. Trader Joe’s, Aldi, Lidl are plugged into highly centralized produce supply chains. Dollar General, Dollar Tree, likewise. Local doesn’t fit their model and they don’t fool around with it. Local is not for everyone.

Locally made and processed.

The next level of local is locally made. This gets into food processing, from fresh products like milk, to snacks, canned and jarred foods, and beverages. The processor is located nearby, but the ingredients aren’t always grown in the area. This is an important point of distinction. Once again, Kimberton is a good example, with a range of fresh milk and yogurts grown and processed in the area. They also sell a fresh sauerkraut from the Lancaster Co-op, grown, chopped and jarred by their producers.

HEB markets lots of Texas-processed milk. Basics Co-op in Wisconsin has an endcap of jarred veggies, preserves and fruits from nearby Sharon, Wisconsin. A little indie store in the mountain town of Bedford, PA has a whole wall of jarred fruits and veggies, very homemade and homespun. On the other end of the spectrum, HEB sources milk from many dairy farms, including large scale operations that would be considered concentrated animal feedlots (CAFOs), even for their organic milk and butter. It’s just a matter of the scale and the cost efficiencies they get in picking up, processing and distributing these products to stores that are relatively nearby. Local, but not cuddly.

Zuppardo’s in Metairie sells a range of local sausages, processed in Baton Rouge and other nearby cities from locally sourced, industrial scale pork. They also have a substantial set of packaged seasoning and grain mixes from a range of Cajun/Creole inspired brands processing ingredients in facilities nearby, sourcing raw materials from all over the world. Likewise Rouse’s, the HEB of NOLA, has several shelves of Blue Runner beans, the distinctive blue cans packed with beans grown and processed nearby, a Cajun pantry staple.

Publix, like various Kroger or Albertsons banners, will have a local endcap, that mishmash of various shelf stable, packaged products, like seasonings and rubs, cookies, salsa, coffee, honey, corn meal and milled grains, marinades, pasta sauce, even bottled water from local springs or ozonated and reverse osmosis filtered from local municipal tap water. This is where localism gets confusing, because sure, this stuff is processed locally, but those coffee beans are from warmer latitudes, those chili peppers and cumin in the rubs, and the multi-ingredient processed products like cookies and salsa mean there are ingredients from around the world.

Such local food manufacturing is a bit more focused at Karn’s, a small chain in central Pennsylvania on the long route between Philly and Chicago. Karn’s is your basic independent supermarket chain. They heavily market their focus on fresh meat and seafood, and disproportionately use UNFI’s legacy Supervalu private label brands as their value tier across the store, literally in every section. But what they excel in is locally manufactured processed foods. Groceries. CPG.

Karn’s has a whole section dedicated to such items and many more placed in categories and departments around the store. It is actually unique in the United States. The products all have a similar down-homey packaging design, nothing too fancy or showy, much of it from nearby Amish country. But all industrial and processed. Industrial local. Nearshoring. Pasta and noodles, pasta sauce, hot sauce, mustard, a huge set of jarred veggies, mushrooms and preserves, plus lots of sodas from nearby Reading and Dutch country, and so many brands of potato chips you would think they are going of style or maybe the hottest new food trend, with many of the potatoes grown locally or at least somewhere close by on the east coast and not all the way west in Idaho or Oregon. It is actually a compelling model, and while few of the items are labeled organic or sustainable, Karn’s is probably the best example of where local needs to go in developing actual supply chain capacity, critical mass of products on shelf, sustainable jobs in the manufacturing sector and the revenue to justify expansion in the marketplace and further investment from a capitalist point of view. Schnuck’s, in the Midwest, also heavily markets its local products, with a huge range of Wisconsin cheeses as well as several different brands of snacks on endcaps and metro rack displays, many of which are made with potatoes grown in the area.

Locally made, HQ’d and owned.

This is where things get squirrely. So let’s say a brand is headquartered somewhere. But do they make the stuff there? Where are the ingredients grown?

Let’s take Pepsi bottlers or Frito Lay snacks. They have plenty of manufacturing facilities around the U.S, with a decentralized, vertically integrated distribution network. That is why they can get their products everywhere, quickly, in quantities that stay fresh even at sweaty gas stations, sketchy bodegas or understaffed dollar stores. The Lay’s still taste like Lay’s, the cool ranch tortilla chips are definitely cool and ranch. The Pepsi still fizzes and foams and tastes like carbonated gasoline, corn syrup and battery acid. Is Pepsi local? Their HQ is in Valhalla, New York.

All private label products are made somewhere, as much as they are marketed to be from nowhere and everywhere at the same time. Private Label, Food From Nowhere. But that is not actually true. Those co-packing plants are all over the place, in the industrial districts alongside fulfillment centers and logistics hubs, or in business development districts in bustling downtowns and suburbs.

Private label is still locally made somewhere. They just don’t market it as such. Sometimes for good reason. A couple years back, the industry’s largest granola maker was subcontracting to underage, undocumented migrant workers to clean the facility at night. There are major meat processing plants in Greeley, Colorado or in rural towns in Arkansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas. Is all that CAFO-sourced meat, in many cases cut and packed for mass merchant retail meat cases by a highly skilled, even unionized, immigrant workforce under daily threat of expulsion and deportation by ICE, is that all local?

There was a VC-funded hummus brand in Austin with a weird name that I forget, I once went to an event at their swanky HQ on South Congress Avenue. I don’t even know where they were making the hummus, but it wasn’t in Austin. I think they went Chapter 11 during the pandemic. Were they local?

Siete Foods is in Austin too, they started out there, the stories are legendary, my team made them a national player after getting spotted by Wheatsville. They have a big billboard out by the airport welcoming you to town, with their warm, colorful brand palette. They have copackers around the country, and they are now owned by our friends at Pepsi. Is Siete Foods still local? Does it even matter? The Garzas have too much dough to give a fuck at this point, but at least the cassava chips are still gluten free (I am eating some now).

Where the rubber meets the road, locally.

From an ethical or attributes standpoint, local ownership is probably the inflection point on local marketing. The point where we need to call bullshit. The signs and 4-ups in stores that need to come down. The copy and content that must be deleted and forgotten. So what if a couple of CPG entrepreneurial trust funders sitting on laptops at a coworking space a block away from their million dollar condos are marketing their silly CPG products as local while sourcing who knows what from all over? Unless they are generating, circulating and keeping wealth in the community, it doesn’t matter, it’s not legit local. And ownership doesn’t matter if the products themselves aren’t clearly articulating what is in them, where it’s all from and how it is all sourced. The attributes matter as much or more than the localism.

The final stage of localism, therefore, is not just local.

It’s local plus attributes. It’s local plus descriptors. It’s beyond just local. It brings us full circle to Pollan’s sage critiques of industrial food alongside his flawed meme of a solution, to “vote with your fork” to stimulate a revolution in conscientious consumption patterns that fell far short of the institutional and structural changes that are still so necessary to change a broken, ridiculous food system.

Local and sustainably grown. Local and organic. Local and plant-based and animal product free. Humanely raised and local, not just locally located abattoirs. Fair paid processing workers, with thriving wages, great benefits, upward mobility and unionized locally. Local facilities that run three shifts, that source ingredients like tomorrow matters, that pay farmers enough to stay on the land and pay their farmworkers living, thriving wages. Local producer co-ops. Local food producers that demand citizenship for all farmworkers and an end to immigrant repression. Local fantasies. Local pipe dreams.

Local through the looking glass.

Local as a concept is not enough. We need to think more broadly, to look elsewhere for ideas. What we should think about is what Global South food system advocates call “territorial food systems” or “territorial markets”, “food from somewhere”.

This is not just the frothy, watered down, contradictory, First World localism. Nor is it resource nationalism, where nation states focus on building up domestic production and protectionist economic policies like tariffs, but aren’t too good at sharing, and typically deploy armed forces to protect supply chains and keep others out. Nasty stuff. Not relevant.

As a July 2024 report by IPES-Food articulates about territorial food systems, “vast populations are being fed daily by close-to-home food webs, supply chains and markets across the world, from public markets and street vendors to cooperatives, from urban agriculture to online direct sales, from food hubs to community kitchens. These diverse webs of ‘territorial markets’ are based around small-scale producers, processors, and vendors, rooted in territories and communities, and play multiple roles within them... territorial markets are the backbone of food systems in many countries and regions, and make critical contributions to food security, equity, and sustainability, while building resilience on multiple fronts…

“Territorial food systems include both market and non-market aspects, covering everything from short food supply chains, sustainable public procurement and civil food networks, to bartering and trading food within and between communities. Crucially, they also center the concept of entitlement-based social policies where sufficient, healthy, and culturally-appropriate food for all is understood and advocated for as a human right…

“Territorial food systems / territorial markets converge on a number of common characteristics, including associations with short chains, multifunctionality and the diversity of market participants which encompasses – as one African study notes – small-scale producers, fishers, pastoralists, cooperatives and farmers organizations, Indigenous people, transporters, bulk buyers/retailers/traders/vendors, consumers, processors, government, urban authorities, private sector, NGOs, and donors.”

And according to UN FAO: “Territorial markets are typical of short food supply chains, which are generally characterized by the involvement of few intermediaries, as well as by geographical and cultural proximity, trust and high social capital. They promote family farming, market inclusivity for small-scale entrepreneurs and producers, and a direct relationship between consumers and producers, as well as improved availability and accessibility for healthy and diversified diets at territorial level”.

And IPES calls out the differences with local, much of which should now be resonant:

“While there is significant overlap between territorial markets and ‘local’ food, there are also important conceptual and real-world distinctions:

Territorial food systems encompass local, regional and transborder food systems. Many territorial markets trade food from a wider geographical area than is commonly understood as ‘local’. ‘Local food’ often connotes a geographical determination alone (e.g., the ‘100-mile diet’), missing the multi-functional richness of territoriality...

For example, food produced and marketed locally may be entirely embedded in corporate value chains. In many contexts ‘local’ branding is not regulated, leaving it vulnerable to being used to hike up prices and/or for green-washing purposes. In the US, for instance, so-called ‘local’ food may be sourced many hundreds of kilometers away, include non-local ingredients, or simply refer to where corporate headquarters are located. The Oakland branch of the Whole Foods supermarket chain labelled their cashew-based yogurt substitute as “local” because the manufacturer is based in nearby San Francisco, although the nuts come from Vietnam or Ivory Coast.”

And the Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples Mechanism of the Committee on World Food Security (CSIPM) goes into further detail about the concept:

“They are directly linked to local, national and/or regional food systems: the food concerned is produced, processed, sold or distributed and consumed within a given “territory”; the gap between producers and end users is narrowed; and the length of the distribution chain is significantly shortened or even direct.

They are inclusive and diversified with a wide variety of agricultural and local food products to the marketplace, reflecting the diversity of the food system(s) of the territory.

They perform multiple economic, social, cultural and ecological functions within their given territories - starting with but not limited to food provision.

They are the most remunerative for smallholders since they provide them with more control over conditions of access and prices than mainstream value chains and more autonomy in negotiating them.

They contribute to structuring the territorial economy since they enable a greater share of the wealth created to be retained, redistributed, and returned to farm level and local economies.

They may be informal, formal, or somewhere in between. To varying degrees, all have some links with the relevant public bodies and the state through tax collection or through public investments.

They include embedded governance systems meaning that they operate according to a set of commonly shared rules that are negotiated between producers, consumers and the local authorities of the territory concerned (local, departmental/provincial, national and regional).

In addition to serving as spaces in which supply and demand are matched up, they are places where political, social and cultural relations play out, and where all people involved interact according to varying degrees of interdependence and solidarity.”

Territorial food systems therefore are a far cry from the shallow localism marketed by grocers.

But grocers can still learn, grow and evolve, especially those not beholden to shareholder dividends and quarterly earnings guillotines, or that have community or employee ownership, or at least active trade unions that have advocated for values-based purchasing and can push corporate leadership to move their business model forward and meet the challenges of 21^st century supply chains. There are good ideas out there. They just need to realized at retail, in supply chains, as operational practices.

The key is to look outside of the retail echo chamber, the trade shows, the conferences, the trade magazines, the white papers and talking head consultants, and take time to see how other people and societies and social movements and ethical enterprises around the world are doing things, especially outside of a Global North bias and from a non-extractive point of view. Why? U.S. based food system stakeholders tend to either fetishize indigenous, Global South foodways in this weird, icky, paternalistic or spiritual manner, or they view them through dismissive, eco-modernist lenses as primitive or backwards, or they see them as resource rich prey ready to be enclosed, exploited and extracted. Not relevant and vital.

Instead, the answer is solidarity and mutual support and learning, that we all share this planet and at the end of the day, local is also global. We are all one or none, as my soap bottle says. Territorial markets can be one way forward. How we get there is a group project, no one is in this alone.

IPES concludes, “To meet the needs of today and be more prepared for the inevitable crises on the horizon, it is critical that diverse resilience-building food systems, supply chains, and markets be better understood and recognized for the many benefits they deliver. These markets can weather shocks and deliver resilience because they are rooted in communities, landscapes, and cultures, and because they empower diverse networks of people to deliver food sovereignty and food security.”

Now wouldn’t that be something delicious.

This essay is dedicated to the brave folks like Chris Smalls risking their lives to break the siege of Gaza. Solidarity y’all.

peace.