It’s unfortunate that locally grown produce isn’t always as easy as a rooftop garden, with produce fresh-picked and available to the sales floor immediately.
Depending on your definition of local, the scale of your operation and the availability of locally-grown produce, the logistics can get complicated.
Steve Morrow, store manager for Bella Vista, Ark.-based Allen’s Food Market sometimes logs the miles himself.
“I had a grower call me last spring and told me one of the people I buy from had no ability to get product to me, so I drove my truck out eight or 10 miles to get it picked up — that helped build the relationship for us,” he said.
Hybrid wholesale
Ephrata, Pa.-based Four Seasons Produce takes advantage of its network of trucks coming back to the office to do back-haul pickups, said David Hahn, director of procurement.
“The majority of our local farms are all in the mid-Atlantic area,” he said. “They’re all within about an hour-and-a-half drive so our trucks are handling back hauls so we have them do the pickups in the afternoon after produce is picked in the morning.”
Pickups happen every day to once a week, depending on the season and the crop.
While growers may be close enough to do direct store deliveries, having Four Seasons pick up is a benefit for retailers, he said.
“The solution we provide is an entire mix — we can offer the entire program from a local perspective, and they have information on what grower it came from, where the products are located,” Hahn said. “Imagine a retailer trying to book two boxes or three boxes from one grower or the next. That can be done, but it takes a lot of time from a produce manager side.”
Four Seasons produces a weekly market report for retail customers outlining the availability from the growers it works with. Relationships have been built over time to optimize growers’ ability, availability and product mix.
“I work on them with seed variety, doing trials and testing different items,” he said. “We try new items and see if they work. Over time it’s really been a cooperative relationship.”
Direct to store? Or warehouse door?
In the past, local growers delivered direct to The Wedge Co-Op in Minneapolis, said Dean Schladweiler, store manager. Growers often worked together to combine deliveries to save on transportation cost and time, but the company decided to make it easier for everyone.
“A big advantage to our local growers now is our warehouse, Coop Partners Warehouse (CPW),” Schladweiler said. “CPW has a cross-dock program that local area growers and vendors have the option to pay a fee for them to drop their product at our warehouse, and CPW delivers those orders to the stores for them.”
Growers appreciate the effort, Schladweiler said, and it helps them get deliveries to the Twin Cities’ many co-op marketplaces.
“This is an incredible advantage to the grower by not only keeping many extra hours of their time off the road, but back on the farm where it’s needed,” he said.
The Wedge works with more than 30 area growers over the course of the year. For a cooperative market like The Wedge, customers are keen to know where their food is grown.
“The staff always looks forward to the season beginning,” Schladweiler said. “There’s always something new. Knowing we are a really big part of growing the local food system and keep it sustainable year after year is important.”
Even for larger retailers like Tyler, Texas-based Brookshire Grocery Co., direct store deliveries make sense for some local items, said Keith Durham, category manager. Brookshire’s operates more than 150 stores in Texas and Louisiana.
“Our customers consider some items local in their store that wouldn’t be local in another,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense to send all of that to the warehouse.”
Multiple SKUs of local peaches, for example, would take up too much space and wouldn’t make sense logistically, he said. Brookshire’s decides those on a case-by-case basis.
The new CSA model
The popularity of Community Supported Agriculture subscriptions — where consumers buy directly from a grower or group of growers and pick up the box at a central location — has been growing over the past few years, and now retailers are seeing the value in this model.
Austin, Texas-based Whole Foods Market Inc.; Kansas City, Kansas-based Ball Food Stores Inc.; and Winston-Salem, N.C.-based Lowes Foods are among those that have been offering a CSA-type subscription box for the past few years, and now Edina, Minn.-based Lunds & Byerlys is getting in on the action.
The company announced in May it plans to offer CSA pickup points for two local farms at all of its Twin Cities stores.
“CSA is a popular way for city residents to buy high quality seasonal produce directly from local farmers,” the company said, in its blog.lundsandbyerlys.com. “In order to participate, you simply sign up for a ‘share’ of the produce — typically a box of vegetables that is delivered on a regular basis — every week, month or whatever terms you agree to when you sign up.”
Lunds & Byerlys offered a text code for consumers to get more information and start the signup process.