Government and industry have teamed up to create an accreditation system designed to create the trust deemed essential for independent retail to hit back at the supermarkets.
The Go! (Genuine Own Produce) mark, co-funded by DEFRA and the National Farmers’ Retail & Markets Association (FARMA), aims to set out a national standard aimed at fending off imitations and ensuring quality.
Go! will run alongside GOAL (Genuine Own and Local) with the former used for farmers’ markets and the latter farm shops.
Its creators believe the mark will create an attitude of collaboration and will prevent larger food companies trading off the ‘farmers’ market’ phrase.
The mark will be certified by external body NSF-CMi Certification, which will primarily look at the provenance of produce and whether the scale of operations is suitable for farmers’ markets.
For GOAL accreditation, farm shops will be assessed on service in the first year with self-assessment backed up by mystery shopper spot checks in the second year before full accreditation.
GOAL will also be more focused on business development, with best practice advice key to the operation.
Both marks were launched by FARMA managing agent Gareth Jones at the Farm & More conference, the biggest of its kind in the organisation’s history, in Telford on Tuesday, with applications for the standards set to open in February.
Jones said: “People really want to know the facts about what they are buying and that it has come straight from the producers. We have to trade on the fact that people trust us and that we are genuine and this is a way to ensure this.
“Many shops have retained the name of farm shop without genuinely being supplied by local farmers and we need to create a way customers can quickly recognise a genuine farm shop.
“As an industry we have problems with variable standards and communication problems and, as such, are vulnerable to threats from people attempting to copy our values, so fighting back on a national platform we have to have national standards.”
There are currently 800 farmers’ markets in the UK, with 250 of them certified under FARMA. According to IGD figures, 26 per cent of people surveyed want to shop more at farmers’ markets in 2010 while 37 per cent expect to buy more local food by 2012.
Jones added that markets must make the most of the current cross-parliamentary markets group, chaired by Rosie Winterton MP, as “other organisations are waiting to jump into the vacuum in our output if we do not produce results”.
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