What Needs Are We Meeting?
Quick Recap: Prasenjit and I are students at Cornell Tech doing research on building a platform to connect farmers with institutional buyers like hospitals or schools. We want to compare local vs. non-local food on price and food miles. Our goal is to show that by buying directly from local farmers buyers can save on both. I used to be a farmer in Upstate New York.
So far our adventure has included Qualitative Interviews, exploring the Ag Census, and finding data on the Origin of Every Product. We’re building an algorithm that matches farmers and buyers.
Now, we’re taking a step back and looking at how Empire State of Food fits into the local food supply chain landscape.
We’ve had a lot of fun digging through the data and figuring out how to put all of the pieces together. It’s important to take a step back and make sure we are building something that helps people meet their needs.
The customer needs addressed by Empire State of Food are for transparency in the food supply for the end consumer, consistent sales for farmers, and a reliable supply of local food for buyers.
Currently, the origin of food products is opaque to the end consumer. Unless consumers have thoroughly educated themselves about how the food supply chain functions, the origins of their food might not have a lot of meaning. We report the percentage of food purchased by institutions that is local. This gives consumers an easy to understand way to be more informed about their food and the people that produce them.
Farmers struggle to scale their businesses with consistent markets. Farmers’ market and CSA sales are down in recent years as the market has become more crowded with big food brands making claims about sustainable, organic food. Farmers need new wholesale buyers that are willing to buy locally. By pooling the yields from multiple farms, there is room for farms with smaller quantities of product to get their foot in the door. This creates more access to buyers with less risk. Farmers can intelligently scale up and be more confident that they will have somewhere to sell their product.
Buyers are frequently hesitant to work with farmers because it is difficult to have a consistent supply of products. By facilitating multiple farms collaborating to serve buyers, we can control for inconsistent supply from any one farmer. If one farmer is hit by a hail storm and loses their tomatoes, the next farmer 20 miles down the road can pick up the slack. The buyer is never without local tomatoes.
There are a few different entities tackling parts of the work that Empire State of Food does.
The Real Food Challenge is a non-profit organization that gives college students the resources to document and investigate where their food comes from and report the percentage of “good food” purchases their school makes. “Good food” is defined by a number of characteristics — one metric is local — but good food can also include organic, animal welfare and fair labor practices. This is one way to make food purchasing on an institutional level more traceable and transparent, but it requires hundreds of hours of unpaid student labor for manual data collection and entry. This is not scalable and does not facilitate making better purchases, it only documents what purchases are made and encourages institutions to buy food more thoughtfully.
Tech start-ups are using sensors and blockchain technology to create a more traceable and transparent food supply chain. These are expensive, energy intensive technologies that are not accessible to most farmers. This is also about documenting where food comes from, but not facilitating the purchase of local food.
Empire State of Food makes it easy to understand how much of your food is local, reports the food miles saved by buying local and facilitates a more reliable, local food supply chain.
