Food industry networking

door rggymr

Nowadays there are a lot of small-scaled food projects where small businesses or even households work together and share their (mostly self-made) products. It adapts to our needs in finding an initiative what is more personal than all the overproduced groceries you can find in the supermarket in your neighbourhood.
Well a lot of people are very positive about these initiatives but I am not because in every square kilometre you can find them. My opinion is that bigger ‘food projects’ also adapt in our needs to do something in our free time. In West Louisville they are planning on a new Food Port where a lot of these mentioned small-scaled food projects come together in a much larger scale what is interesting considering that it is positive for consumers social and material wellbeing.

Something bigger and better
This Food Port includes: an urban farm, edible garden, market and food truck plaza, retail space, classrooms, a recycling facility and much more. It is a form of collaboration between businesses and the information they have about food (so it’s not very high-tech and it doesn’t exchange data or something). This information is given away in an easy accessible way.

In my opinion…
… something like the plan in building a food port for West Louisville is better because it takes a lot of time and it gives the opportunity to personalize your shopping trip. As a whole, the large Food Port is nothing but personal. But because of all the different located smaller businesses, consumers can get information (and even education) about their products. Consumers like it when they can get everything at one place, but they are also tired of the non-sustainable mass production of food. The Food Port will be a place where producers and consumers meet: prosuming. It is transparent because the Food Port includes several key programs that serve and provide for all stages of the food chain, from farming, to processing, shared community kitchen spaces, retail, and recycling.

In the future
Maybe in the future a lot of the little food projects in our neighbourhoods which can’t get off the ground, can work together with a Food Port like the one planned for West Louisville. We can go back to the essence of making our own personal products in a more sustainable way. If the collaboration between a Food Port and consumers works, little food projects can be done in a much larger scale. I think in the end also larger-scaled initiatives can be personal because all the information about the products is right there on the spot.

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