Scaling Up: Meeting the Demand for Local Food

Robust local food systems offer social, environmental, and economic benefits. Increasingly, wholesale buyers are demanding locally grown food and growers are looking for new regional markets. In order to meet the demand for locally and regionally grown food and move significant quantities of this food into markets such as restaurants, mainstream grocery stores, and institutions, local food systems need to be scaled up or expanded from farmer-direct sales of small quantities of product to wholesale transactions.

By scaling up, local food systems have the potential to borrow some of the economic and logistical efficiencies of the industrial food system while retaining social and environmental priorities such as sustainable agricultural practices and profitability for small- and mid-scale family farms and businesses.

To develop informed business development strategies for Wisconsin farmers and other supply chain start-ups, the UW-Madison Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems (CIAS) and UW-Extension Agricultural Innovation Center studied and documented eleven models of regional food aggregation and distribution. This work was made possible by a grant from the Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment.