03/31/08 Choosing to Eat Local

Choosing to Eat Local. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. By now you have been hearing more and more about choosing and eating local, supporting the local ag producers and at the same time getting fresher products. It seems the idea is catching on in many areas. Laurie Demerrit is the President and COO of the Hartman Group a research firm that has recently been doing some work in the organic or natural market and during their research, some interesting things started to come to light. DEMERRIT: What we've been hearing for about the last 12-18 months is more and more consumers who are bringing up local as an element that in many cases as important or even more important to them than something like organic or natural right now. Demerrit says that there are a number of reasons for the shift in consumer's interest. DEMERRIT: The reason for that is because consumers are very much looking for a connection to the food that they're eating; at the face behind the product as it were so that's number one but number two, certainly there's some freshness attributions around local where consumers believe that since it is produced geographically close to them there's probably going to be more of a health benefit, a higher quality and a freshness benefit to those products as well. There has been some concern is the last couple of years over the idea of possible agro-terrorism but Demeritt doesn't believe that is much of a factor in consumers choices. DEMERRIT: If you asked them about food safety and the benefits of potentially getting something domestically produced versus internationally, they'd say yes they certainly prefer that but frankly when we're talking to them there's a lot else going on there and it has a lot to do with the emotional connection to the products. That idea of wanting to know the producer, talk to the producer, envision the place where it was grown and again that freshness cue is one that's very much about sort of a personal health benefit. Safety is an important issue but not as top of mind for consumers. When people go to the grocery store they are really just more concerned with what to buy for dinner. Demerrit believes that some things have changed over the last several years to drive the consumer thinking. DEMERRIT: There's a few things going on, I mean number one what we've seen over the past few years is that increasingly consumers want to have products that are less packaged, less processed  fresher in their words. And we see that happening in the grocery stores. You'll see that in most grocery stores especially out here in the Pacific Northwest the section that is in the perimeter of the store where the produce, the meat, the dairy, the prepared foods, that section of the store is increasingly getting larger and larger and busier and busier. Tomorrow we talk more about the research done on local products. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.