Scaling Up: Meeting the Demand for Local Food, A free report on local wholesale food aggregation & distribution by UW Madison CIAS & Extension

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The UW Madison Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems (CIAS) and UW Extension are pleased to announce the release of Scaling Up: Meeting the Demand for Local Food, profiling 11 enterprises active in local wholesale food supply chains.

To access an electronic copy of the document, please visit: www.cias.wisc.edu/farm-to-fork/scaling-up-meeting-the-demand-for-local-food/

To purchase a hard copy, please visit the UW Extension Learning Store at learningstore.uewx.edu or contact Lindsey Day Farnsworth: ldfarnsworth@wisc.edu, 608.890.2433.

BACKGROUND
Robust local food systems offer social, environmental and economic benefits. Increasingly, wholesale buyers are seeking local food and growers are looking for new local markets. To meet the demand for locally grown food and move large quantities of it into markets such as restaurants, grocery stores and institutions, local food systems must expand from farmer-direct sales of small quantities to wholesale transactions. By scaling up, local food systems may borrow economic and logistical efficiencies from the industrial food system while retaining social and environmental values such as sustainable agricultural practices and profitability for small- and mid-scale family farms and businesses.

To develop informed business development strategies for Wisconsin farmers and other supply chain start-ups, the UW-Madison CIAS and UW-Extension Agricultural Innovation Center documented and analyzed eleven models of regional food aggregation and distribution.