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Community Food Enterprise: Local Success in a Global Marketplace
Michael Shuman
Published Jan 25, 2010
A report by Michael Shuman, Alissa Barron and Wendy Wasserman
Community Food Enterprise is a project of The Wallace Foundation, and BALLE
Summary
The local food movement is now spreading globally, yet is not well understood. To many, local food is exclusively about proximity, with discriminating consumers demanding higher quality food grown, caught, processed, cooked, and sold by people they know and trust. But an equally important part of local food is local ownership of food businesses. This report is about the full range of locally owned businesses involved in food, whether they are small or big, whether they are primary producers or manufacturers or retailers, whether their focus is local or global markets. We call these businesses community food enterprises (CFEs).
Some dismiss the recent rise of local food and CFEs as just a passing fad. We see it as the natural consequence of the improving competitiveness of CFEs. Not only are CFEs getting more market savvy, but they are also taking advantage of the growing diseconomies of global food businesses. Long, nonlocal supply chains, for example, are increasingly vulnerable to rising oil prices. It’s true that CFEs face special challenges from their modest scale in leadership, finance, secession, and technology, to name a few but they are also developing impressive ways of overcoming them.
This report provides a detailed field report on the performance of 24 CFEs, half inside the United States and half international. We show that CFEs represent a huge diversity of legal forms, scales, activities, and designs. From these case studies, we address four questions:
- What strategies are community food enterprises deploying to heighten their competitiveness?
- What are the major challenges facing these enterprises and the ways they are overcoming those challenges?
- How well are these enterprises meeting the triple bottom lines of profit, people, and planet?
- To what extent are successful CFE models capable of being replicated worldwide?
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