Why Do Local Foods Seem Invisible?

We have found, over the years, that one of the best ways for a grower to learn about how local foods work (or fail to work) is to go somewhere else and try to be a local foods customer for a little while.  Of course, this makes the assumption that the grower actually is able to get AWAY from the farm and that they are also able to afford taking that time away.  I recognize these are both insurmountable obstacles for some who farm to produce food for local consumption.

Happily, we have had the ability to make these trips and we have made the time away from the farm a priority - if only to provide ourselves with a needed balance in our lives.  So, when we do go, we do our best to stay some place where we can prepare many of our own meals.  Then, we try to source as much as we can through local growers, attending farmers markets, or looking for ways to order direct from the farm.  If we find locally owned food establishments that also source from local producers, we also try to patronize those locations.

But, if you aren't familiar with the area and/or you aren't already committed to digging to find these sources of food, they can be practically invisible.

Sunshine Market at Hanapepe

Before I go much further with this, let me just say that I am not criticizing those who are certainly doing their best to try to promote locals foods.  What I hope to do is share observations that I have as a potential customer from the perspective of being a grower who is also fully aware of the difficulties growers have in reaching their customers.

In fact, the biggest issue I can see (and have experienced) from the grower's side of the equation is the simple lack of resources to make local foods visible.

Hale Puna Market in Waimea

Simply acquiring and/or creating a good sign or two can actually be a sizable expense for smaller markets and small-scale growers.  And the problem goes beyond that.  These signs typically must be portable and easily stored for any grower that has multiple delivery sites.  It is rare that a local farmers market or a other local food business is able to secure a permanent location for a sign that is actually large enough to grab the attention of people who are typically ensconced in their cars and trucks.

It gets even harder when you realize you need to have signs in multiple locations to handle all of the potential entry points for customers.  Then, you have to consider the traffic sources where you hope to grab people's attentions and direct them to the sales location itself.  If a small farmers' market (for example) wanted to become visible, it could easily require ten to twenty larger sized signs - some of which should be permanent in nature to remind customers of the dates and times the market is open.

Oh... and let's not forget.  Someone has to put up and take down these signs every time there is a market.  Who typically does that?  It is normally one of the vendors - unless a market is large (and fortunate) enough to have an individual who is the market manager and does not double as a vendor.

I can tell you, from experience, that we are aware of how important signage can be.  We are also fully aware that if you manage to create and stage all of the signs effectively, but don't have the time to stock your tables with product - it will fail anyway.  So, in our case, we usually made sure to have the product first and then tried to wedge the sign part into our routine as best we could.

The second issue with visibility is figuring out how and where you should be promoting your products. 

In the present day there is a WIDE range of opportunities for a small-scale grower to promote their own business.  There is social media and the web.  You can speak to community groups and schools and churches and ...  whomever will listen.  You can attend local foods fairs and dinners.  You can sign up to be included on lists for farmers markets, CSAs, food hubs and other local foods.

In fact, there are so many locations and opportunities that you could wear yourself out trying to cover them all - and keep them maintained and updated from year to year.

I suppose it is great that there are all of these opportunities - possibly more than I can count and definitely more than I could locate each year before the growing season started in earnest.

So, think about it.  If it is difficult for a grower - who should be focusing on producing great food - to keep track of all of the promotion options available to them... what does it look like to a potential customer?

Well, let me tell you what it looks like.  A couple of recent visits found us scouring the web and social media for information on locals foods in two different locations.  In one case, we found as many as TEN different sites listing the farmers market locations and times for the area.  TEN!  That sounds great, doesn't it?

Not so.  None of the sites agreed on which farmers' markets were open given pandemic restrictions.  Many of the sites only included a subset of the markets that were likely being held.  It was common for a single market to have conflicting times, dates and even locations from one website/social media site to the next.  None of these sites included any information newer than a couple months prior to the date we viewed the information - not even the social media pages.

And lets not get into the issue with trying to figure out WHICH social media platform to go to in the first place.

Local foods often become invisible while they are still in full view because there is rarely, if ever, a single, authoritative location where a person can go to get information.  The growers are left to expend whatever time and energy they can trying to judge the best locations to make sure information is up to date and then HOPE that the customer runs into the correct location.

Then, after only a few years, the landscape changes.  A new social media site attracts more people and an old stand-by falls out of favor.  What does the grower do now?

It's a recipe for disaster and invisibility.

You see, Tammy and I were not deterred by the varied information and missing details when we wanted to be local foods customers at these different locations.  We still found a way to patronize people who worked hard to produce quality local foods.  But, even we were a bit frustrated by the process.  What do you think MOST people would do in our place?

Correct.  They would say "heck with it" and just go to the big chain grocery store and leave it at that.

And the tragedy of it all was that there were tables full of quality produce at some markets we located and too few customers.  Other markets were much smaller than they once were, having suffered from the vicious cycle that haunts this sort of marketing.  Customers don't come consistently.  Vendors scale down how much they bring or leave the market or simply leave the profession.  Now there is less at the market and people who decide to give it a try don't find enough of what they want - so they don't come back.  And the market continues to shrink.

If we want local foods to thrive, then we need people to make commitments to make the invisible visible again.

If someone gets a grant to fund a new website that will promote local growers, then they need to commit to maintaining AND promoting that site for years.  That includes regular check ins with each market and each vendor to be sure that the content is up to date and correct.  And, when I say "check-in" I mean there needs to be more than an email that invites a person to visit their profile and update it every January.  

If there is a city/county/state government promotion site for markets and local foods, it needs to be maintained actively rather than passively.  Local chambers of commerce sites can't expect vendors and markets to behave just like another business either.  Typically local foods vendors will not be attending the golf outings for local entrepreneurs and a grower usually does not have someone hired to just handle promotions and marketing.

And if someone wants to volunteer to help at the farmers market, they need to commit to volunteering consistently.  If you want to make the claim that you support local foods, you need to do it continuously - not only when it is convenient for you.  Just as the local foods producer must commit to doing what they do on a daily basis to bring quality, tasty food to their communities.

Until we commit to solving these problems, I am afraid that local foods will continue to be invisible to all but the fortunate few who are in the know.  And those few are not enough to keep local foods going.