Local-food movement has distribution problems

The National Restaurant Association says the local-food movement is gaining in popularity among restaurants, but restaurants are finding supplies hard to come by as distributors are slow to embrace the movement. In addition to many large food distributors not carrying local products, "fragmented networks of local farms don't know how to distribute the food efficiently," Jay Field of National Public Radio reports. Some distributors say food safety concerns prevent them from providing local food.

When Amy Miller, the food service director at Sauk Prairie Memorial Hospital near Madison, Wis., asked distributor Reinhart Food Service for some local organic chickens, she was told food-safety regulations made that impossible. "While these federal guidelines are voluntary, big distributors require them to minimize the risk of delivering contaminated food," Miller told Field. Reinhart Food wouldn't comment on the story, but Bob Golden, an industry analyst in Chicago, says the main barrier to more local food is economically based.

"The major distributors are trying to gauge demand, and adjust their orders and offers accordingly," Golden told Field. "It's very complex and complicated, adding a whole realm of locally sourced foods." Kyle Stiegert, a food systems economist at the University of Wisconsin, added that the upfront investment required of distributors to fully embrace local food makes the cost prohibitively high for the foreseeable future. "To me, the key is to make local food available, but also to make it price competitive," he told Field. "Without the price competition, it's going to be harder to get people engaged on this." (Read more)