There is a growing awareness among consumers that local food can contribute to good health, freshness of the product and provide social benefits such as reducing food miles and environmental pressure. Despite these benefits, the purchase and consumption of more local food lags behind. This is partly due to limited accessibility and range of local products, a prevailing stigma that the products are expensive and confusion about what ‘local’ means versus ‘organic ’.
Research on shopping preferences
At the kitchen table, the researchers, affiliated with Radboud University's Nijmegen School of Management, used kitchen interviews and other methods to visualize how healthy and local food options are perceived by the consumer target group, employees of Radboud University. Besides the willingness to buy local food more often, key challenges and barriers were revealed: for example, in terms of commuting , shopping patterns and purchasing convenience. Based on these insights, in collaboration with the Campus & Facilities division, ways to encourage employees to purchase local food products for home in their work environment were explored, through various trial set-ups of a pop-up shop in the Refter and encouraging visits to nearby convenience store Regio Oogst.
No grocerie shopping for take home
What transpired? Products that can be consumed in the work environment itself, such as strawberries, sold quite well. But products for cooking, such as pasta and cheese, did not so much. Apparently, the mental and practical barriers to shopping in a work environment for home, are too big: work and home seem to be two separate compartments in the minds of consumers, and the retail concepts tested could not sufficiently remove these barriers. The main challenge for the future when it comes to offering local food products on campus. lies in removing or reducing barriers around buying food for home at work. To this end, experiments testing other vending concepts can be conducted to explore what it does to offer local food in different forms, at different times and in different locations. In addition, increasing local offerings in employees' food environments is likely to require more structural offerings, greater visibility and more targeted marketing.
Discover more
Read more about the project called ‘Alliance for more sustainable regional food’ (Alliantie voor meer duurzaam regionaal voedsel), which involves the mapping of buying behaviour and regional products. The project is made possible in part by a financial contribution from the province of Gelderland, POP3 Professionalisation Short Supply Chains 2021 and ELFPO, the "European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development: Europe invests in its countryside".
