The UK has seen extraordinary demands on food supply chains over the last couple of years. Now, some sources claim that local suppliers and producers will play a key role in the food supply chain’s recovery and growth. They speak about new opportunities for local suppliers as businesses and consumers turn to their communities to supply what those overseas no longer can.
There are, of course, obstacles to relying on local produce, a major one being a lack of consumer awareness of the advantages of ‘buying local’. Agricultural organizations have made great strides in educating and informing the public in recent years, but there is still an underlying assumption that buying local is expensive and inaccessible, when this is simply not the case.
Local UK suppliers that provide a direct sales platform from producer to consumer, for example farm shops, saw a boom in activity last year. Indeed, they had a huge part to play in ensuring that consumers were able to source essential food products in the early stages of the Covid pandemic when many larger retailers were suffering from empty shelves. That, coupled with new services like click & collect and delivery, ensured farm shops and local suppliers were attractive alternatives to supermarkets.
With concerns surrounding overseas food standards becoming more apparent, people are increasingly interested in the provenance of their shopping, and supermarkets cannot compete with the farm-to-fork journey that farm shops offer.
Read the complete article at heraldscotland.com.