Ryan_Cope
Consumers with purchasing power appreciate having the ability to vote with their dollar, especially when it comes to food. This is one of the best ways consumers can take a stand for a cause they believe in.
In this valley, supporting local food while also saving the environment is that cause.
But, how do producers and fruit retailers in the Okanagan stand to benefit from this movement?
As a consumer on a tight budget, I am always looking for a worthwhile deal. As an environmentalist, I’m also looking for the deal that will save me money while also saving the planet. For me, this means avoiding excessive plastic bags at the till; bringing my own produce bags to fill up with oranges at the grocery store; and avoiding plastic straws like the plague.
From a business perspective, I see this as a golden opportunity. Now more than ever, in a world filled with thoughts of “food security,” and news headlines screeching about a plastic-filled ocean by 2050, many consumers want to know the food they’re eating is safe, locally produced, and isn’t trashing the planet. If you needed a new marketing plan for 2017, this is it; sustainable fruit retail.
Recently, I have begun investigating where my food comes from, an act I would encourage for all consumers, regardless of wallet size. In doing this research, which is by no means extensive, I have come to the conclusion that in the age of endless data, rampant social media, and an interconnected planet the likes of which we’ve never seen before, discovering how our food is made is relatively easy...but we’re not all doing it. Here in the Okanagan, this task is practically a walk in the park (or, cherry orchard, as it were) and in fact, many consumers do this every summer, as the produce stands lining the highways begin opening their doors for the season.
As owners of these fruit stands and packing houses, giving consumers the ability to see behind the scenes into your operation is a big deal. It’s what makes you, the producer, seem real. It’s why we get a shot of good feelings after spending money to buy a basket of cherries, fresh-picked and still warm from the summer sun at your U-Pick farm; but we don’t get those same fuzzy feelings buying avocados from Mexico at the grocery store in the middle of winter.
This past fall I had the good fortune to do just this and got a glance into the world of apples. Having just recently arrived in BC from coastal Maine, I was clueless to the fact this valley is famous for its fruit and agrifarm tours. My first visit to De Simone Farms in Rutland absolutely blew my mind. By walking the path of an apple, from tree to box, I learned so much about the process it takes to get our food from point A to B and learned it’s complicated getting that box to market.
In the advocacy world, there is a tendency to demonize certain kinds of packaging for the way they harm the environment. The poster child for this campaign is the plastic shopping bag, made to last forever, but used for only a handful of items and then thrown away. Plastic eating utensils came next, then drinking straws, and for a while, we were even getting up in arms over produce stickers, with a movement to eliminate and replace them with laser-etched produce tags.
As we walked past the machines adhering stickers to each apple, destined for grocery store shelves across Canada, I asked Pierre De Simone, Operations Manager for the packing house, about the likelihood of this new technology taking off. His response was, “When was the last time you ever saw anything laser-etched?” The fact of the matter is that the machines capable of laser-printing specific PLU numbers on fruit are expensive, to the point of being cost-prohibitive for most medium-sized packing houses. Even large-scale fruit packers are not making a move toward this technology. Instead, they are choosing enhanced stickers that give retailers more information at the point of sale.
Taking this walk through De Simone’s packing house with Pierre allowed me to see the operation with my own eyes, and get a direct, straight answer from him about my packaging questions. In short, the retailers demand certain packaging, and in order to stay in business that demand has to be met. Produce stickers, a menace to the packers and consumers alike, are not going anywhere anytime soon.
From the consumer point of view, tackling issues like this often seem fruitless (no pun intended) when we realize the scale at which food is being produced, packed, and shipped globally. So many of these operating rules and regulations are difficult to change, and if change happens it will be slow and laborious. In some cases, the smaller and more local the business, the more flexibility they will have in making packaging decisions that help meet their bottom line, and also show the customer that they care about the environment. It’s not so easy for a large, international food distributor, and this is perhaps a serious consequence of having a globalized food system. With so many interconnected parts, making one change will invariably mean making many changes across many groups, and that takes time.
With change at the operations level not necessarily a timely option, it has to come from elsewhere and this gets back to a new way of marketing, already beginning to take hold but in need of a major boost. How do we tackle these problems of waste and local food at once? At the point-of-sale, the place where the produce meets the consumer! The beauty of addressing the waste issue at this point in the food system is that it can be done in ways that benefit both the producer and the consumer, and are quick to implement!
At produce stands, offer recycled boxes, bins, or totes to haul produce away, instead of traditional plastic bags.
Offer customer incentives. Encourage your customers to return used containers for a discount on their next purchase of fruit, or sweeten the deal by enacting a bring-your-own (bag, box, bin) policy and reward customers who do so with a percentage off their order.
In the event that a plastic bag is necessary (even a hardened environmentalist will admit that delicate cherries need some extra TLC after they’ve been picked!), consider switching to a bag that contains a high percentage of recycled material, typically found at bulk cost, reasonable for even small-scale operations.
Reusable bags are always in style. If you have the means and it makes sense for your business, consider bulk-ordering high-quality reusable bags, branded with your business’s logo.
While not all consumers are concerned about saving the planet, the beauty in creating consumer-facing policies like these are that they will work anyway because typically, saving money is something that consumers do care about. By giving people incentive to change their behavior you are not only saving yourself money in the long-run, but you are also building a relationship with your consumers that will make them want to come back for more.