Local food flourishes with supermarket ban

by Nicole Weston, Posted Jun 26th 2006 @ 1:04PM

A Suffolk town refused to give permission to build a Tesco superstore in their neighborhood in 1997 and, since that time, local businesses and agriculture have flourished. Despite an overall decrease in the number of smaller, independent stores throughout Britain, the number of businesses in town has remained the same and the number of local/regional food suppliers increased from 300 to 370, meeting the demand from local butchers, bakers and greengrocers. The local shops primarily source from local sources, and have not found themselves to be limited in what they can offer their customers. In fact, they have slowly been expanding into more diverse foods and vegetables as suppliers find people to grow them.

Over the past decade, many other store proposals from developers have been turned down and the locals' position gets stronger after each refusal. The hardest part is shaking the mindset that values convenience and sometimes price, over quality and belief. The locals would rather know where their food is coming from, who is selling it to them and that they are supporting quality food in their community, than save a few pennies on carrots from elsewhere in the world at Tesco.

Stores like Waitrose and Marks & Spencer have already put effort into sourcing more local ingredients, which has made customers and local business people alike very happy as well as demonstrating that local foods can be utilized on a larger scale. This is useful to note because it is not possible for the Suffolk strategy to work everywhere; some areas are simply not suited to agricultural purposes. What the Suffolk example does show is that the local food movement can still thrive in a modern environment as long as people are committed to it.

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Filed Under: Business, Stores & Shopping
Tags: baker, britain, british isles, butcher, country, england, farm, farming, food, greengrocer, local, local businesses, local food, local foods, rural, stores-and-shopping, suffolk, supermarket, suppliers, tesco, uk

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Reader comments (Page 1 of 1)

6-26-2006 @1:38PM Jared said... To poach an idea from a friend of mine, if you overlay the airlines emissions panic AND the rising cost of fuel, the local foods movement is inevitable...

It just costs too much (fiscally and environmentally) to ship your food in from South Africa any more.
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6-26-2006 @4:38PM Alexi said... " The locals would rather know where their food is coming from, who is selling it to them and that they are supporting quality food in their community, than save a few pennies on carrots from elsewhere in the world at Tesco."

The smart observer would avoid such sweeping generalizations about all of the represented citizenry. I'm sure that not all of the town's residents favored the local growers, and may have preferred the more-convenient, less-expensive one-stop-shop option that Tesco would have offered. Was the land that Tesco wanted to develop on privately owned? If so, this is nothing more than another incidence of government meddling with the market. (Granted, Europe's socialist policies care little for property rights.) Screw local producers. If more people were truly in favor of local produce, Tesco would learn a very costly lesson when it went out of business.
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6-27-2006 @7:52AM Nicole Weston said... One thing that I am certain that the locals would rather do is keep their jobs and businesses - which they do by helping the local economy and supporting those businesses, not by eliminating all the functions that would be rolled into one supermarket.
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6-27-2006 @5:15PM Alexi said... Because foodies aren't known for their economic prowess, and because I happen to get a kick out of most of your submissions, I'm willing to let the economic points you're trying to make slide.

Let it be known, however, that some of us would rather the convenience/savings of a low-price megasupermarket over the warm & fuzzy feeling I get from overpaying for something produced locally.
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6-30-2006 @8:26AM maja said... the fact is great distribution can stand some year while stabilizate its presence on a place, small sellers can't afford the market oscillations a great chain can, in this way great chains rules in a few time in every place their concurrence is only small shops.
maybe you don't give a shit for this but if concurrence on a place goes down the main detentor of service can do what he wants, other chains usually propose theirself as contenders only if they can take his same place...
free of choise in this way disappear in the time the fist economic crisis push most of worried people to buy in the supermarket because in the while small shoppers fail.
it's ok if you want to buy in a supermarket, but take the time to think about long time convenience if it's expense your matter, for say 20$ a week you can.
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