Land has long been a symbol of national identity, and few things evoke Britain more than a bucolic scene, memorialised by the likes of Constable, Clare or Heaney.
It’s no wonder then, that the recent blend of Brexit and healthy eating trends is seeding a demand for local produce as shoppers look to recapture a more wholesome relationship with food. No retailer has better expressed this urge than Morrisons, who commissioned a YouGov survey last year, which showed 67 per cent of its customers preferred to buy local.
This prompted them to launch a well publicised “X Factor” style hunt for new British suppliers, with farmers pitching to the retailer their credentials across a series of regional auditions.
At the time, chairman of Morrisons Andy Higginson said: “Our customers tell us they want to see more food that is made just down the road from their own communities and that’s why we are looking for the next generation of British and local foodmakers to serve our 12 million customers.”
Last month Morrisons announced it would be expanding the project following the successful integration of 750 new products into its stores with the local scheme credited for boosting profits last year. “All of our strawberries in season are British, but if strawberries are being grown in Garforth, where we have a store down the road, we can sell ‘picked today, sold today’ Garforth strawberries, and people see this as important,” beamed chief executive David Potts, following the 2018 annual report.
Jonathan Smith, of retail consultants Axis, says: “Our consumer research over the years has shown that most shoppers would slightly prefer local, i.e. same county, or part of the country, versus far-away sourcing. For most, this does not extend to any willingness to pay more for it. For some, the (mild) motivation is supporting local producers; for others, it’s reducing road miles.”
In this light, being British is not enough. In a nation with numerous regional identities, it’s not a given that people feel British produce is somehow “theirs” in the way that produce from their local Cornish or Cumbrian farm does. In Europe similar trends called “local-for-local” describe local producers supplying local retailers, while in America retailers are even growing salad on their rooftops to match consumer tastes for “hyperlocal” produce.
George Beach, managing director of midlands grower Mudwalls, whose own produce is stocked in local Co-op stores under his brand, says the trend is well underway.
“Without a doubt consumers are looking for their local growers – they know where it is grown and they may know the grower, and think ‘I’m going to support them’ because they’re my neighbour,” Beach says.
Yet with such vast supply chains, and constrained by tight consistency specifications, retailers have struggled to figure out how a fragmented local-for-local supply network might work.
When Sir Peter Kendall raised the issue with Tesco boss Dave Lewis at the City Food Lecture in February, asking if it would be too much to ask “for a bit of shelf space set aside for local produce”, Lewis simply said it would be too difficult for a company of their size.
His words were not unfounded. Food and retail consultant David Young, who worked as a fresh produce buyer for Co-op, says previous local buying managers had been trialled before by Tesco to little avail.
“If you were to go back in time, Tesco were one of the first to put in a structure to do that. They had regional buying teams, as did Asda. You had people working for individual stores with very low volumes of produce that sat outside the process. Suppliers would supply direct to branches, there were operational issues, different supply managers. People weren’t sure where it fitted inside the structure or who was responsible for reordering. It was difficult and you ended up confusing the customer, which is why it fell flat, except in places with a more nationalistic element like Scotland.”
But with Brexit on course, Young notes that retailers will be forced to look closer to home, which, as he says, “is a better motive than the emotional one”. Smith adds: “Supermarkets could potentially stock hyperlocal produce, but to do so on any great scale would not fit with their supply chain model, with its depot system, high efficiencies etc. I don’t believe hyperlocal will achieve any great scale, so would make only a very small difference in the face of the potentially massive effects of Brexit.”
One solution may lie in local distribution centres that will help local suppliers compete with larger regional distributors. Beach is involved in the development of one such centre in the midlands, which he hopes will pave the road for smaller suppliers.
“Local supply at the moment has added costs because it’s small volumes. But by bringing it into a local hub within the midlands and by bringing that under one roof we can start competing with bigger distribution centres with local distribution.”
Of course, agri-tech is also having its say. AI company Blue Yonder, on hearing about the success of Morrisons’ local supply scheme, offered their services to retailers in creating software to manage the vast number of supply decisions retailers make every day.
Chief executive Uwe Weiss says: “‘Buying local’ has been one of the most noticeable trends in grocery of recent years. This will present a massive logistical challenge to replenishment teams. The average national grocery chain needs to make approximately 20m replenishment decisions per day, and this will only be further complicated by adding in local suppliers to each store’s supply chain. This is far too much data and decision-making to be done by a team of humans, and it is here that artificial intelligence can prove vital.”
While large-scale agri-tech and international supply chains will dominate the future of food supply, it can’t remove shoppers’ desire for local produce. It doesn’t matter how advanced your farm is if consumers prefer the one down the road. Retailers are increasingly eager to tap into this sentiment, and with new distribution models and technology able to accommodate them, we will likely see more and more local and hyperlocal produce on our shelves, meaning Britain’s pastoral identity may well flourish in the future.
