Browsing by Subject "Food marketing"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Come and Get it!: What You Need to Know to Serve Food on Your Farm
    (St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture, 2015) Armstrong, Rachel; Kivirist, Lisa
    Dining directly on a farm appeals to local food enthusiasts and to host farmers alike. Customers get to savor specialties made with that farm’s fresh-raised fare, and chat with the farmer who grew it. Host farmers get to share their farm home and bucolic setting while loyal customers taste the harvest in the freshest possible manner. Add these two motivations together and you see a vibrant movement of on-farm food events, from informal “pizza farms” selling wood-fired pizzas made with farm-raised ingredients to pricier white-tablecloth, multi-course dinners. While the concept of sharing a meal around a table reaches back through centuries of history, in today’s business and regulatory reality it isn’t as simple as setting out an extra table and chairs and collecting cash to get something started. Adding any form of on-farm food service to your farm business mix requires a well-thought-out and strategic planning process to bring you to long-term success.
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    Commercial Kitchen Guide
    (St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture, 2014-09-01) Korslund, Karen; Schweser, Greg; Grewell, Rachel
    Community commercial kitchens available for rent to members of the public can be used as incubation facilities for beginning food entrepreneurs like caterers, product manufacturers, or food truck operators. They may also be a means for local farmers to add value to raw product in order to expand their marketing potential. Community commercial kitchens are different from other community kitchens in that they are approved for use by licensed food businesses, and may be used to create products for sale in wholesale or retail markets. This guide is intended to provide information on policies and regulations for those looking to open or operate in a community commercial kitchen.
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    A Guide to Regulations for Local Food Entrepreneurs
    (St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture, 2015) O'Hara, Megan
    Rapid growth in numbers and kinds of farmers’ markets have served as incubators of many new food enterprises and spurred some farmers to enter into value-added products or light processing activities. The growth of many small food enterprises has created challenges for local and state regulators to enforce existing food code and statutory requirements, many of which were written and developed in a different era. This Report starts with an overview of the federal, state and local regulatory framework that deals with food, followed by the focus areas of entrepreneurial activities: farmers’ markets, mobile food units and commercial kitchens.
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    Land market integration, structural change, and smallholder farming in Zambia
    (2014-08) Larson, Andrew Mark
    As developing economies grow, structural transformation affects not only sector shares of labor, value added, and consumption, but also intrasector marketing channels. One of the most dramatic examples of this transformation is in the evolution of food marketing channels in countries such as Zambia. Reardon's supermarket revolution research shows how supermarkets enter and transform food marketing channels in historically short periods of time compared to the earlier experience of developed nations. This study employs a dynamic general equilibrium model to examine the effect of this structural transformation story on smallholder farmers in Zambia. Two policy experiments are carried out against the baseline case.In the first experiment, the bifurcation of Zambia's agricultural land markets prevents smallholder farmers from participating in modern food marketing channels. High transaction costs in terms of time and financial resources make conversion of customary land into commercial land title prohibitively expensive for smallholder farmers. The simulated conversion of land title, without changing ownership, instigates a reallocation of capital and labor resources in the modeled economy that benefits smallholders in their roles as producers and household owners of factors of production. With the increase in commercial land area, labor becomes scarce and farm production becomes more capital intensive, thus increasing labor productivity and smallholder household income. This analysis highlights the importance of integrating land markets and giving smallholders an effective increase in the range of their resource allocation decisions.In the second experiment, constraints to smallholder participation in modern food marketing channels are relaxed in order to understand the effects on not only smallholder farmers, but also on Zambia's factor and output markets. Participation in modern marketing channels allows smallholders to supply not only greater downstream value-added processors, but also the world wholesale market. The results show that policies to open modern channels to smallholders benefit smallholders as households and producers.