The Midwest: The Center of Everything

“Organic wasn’t predominant 20 years ago,” Bowe remarks, “but now it represents 20 percent of our sales. This is definitely a five-year outlook item for us, and we’re looking to see what other organic items we can add.”

Where organic meets value-added products, however, is a different story for many suppliers. Caito Foods’ Kirch admits, “We’re not there yet, but that day will come. Consumers just need to be willing to pay for it.”

Corsaro explains the gap. “Organic value-added items can be a challenge because the price point is high already,” he notes. In other words, until consumers are willing to pay a premium, value-added organic produce in a grab-and-go format remains price prohibitive.

Though organic sales fluctuate from state to state and even regionally, acreage throughout the United States continues to climb and the Midwest reflects the trend as well. Of the five states discussed in this article—Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, Ohio, and Wisconsin—all experienced significant growth in organic activity since 2000, including new operators and expanded cropland. Missouri, the largest by land mass, was topped in organic cropland by Wisconsin, with nearly 160,000 acres to the Show-Me State’s 42,000-plus acres.

Sourcing Local
The very definition of local can be a challenge to some distributors (for more discussion and details on how growers, receivers, and vendors define ‘locally grown’—see the Fresh Forum sidebar in this article).

“As an importer, we have to jump through many hoops to prove our produce is safe,” explains Bowe, such as lab testing and certification. “The premise behind ‘local’ is it’s fresher and better; the problem is the food safety aspect,” he points out, since many small, local growers are not subject to the same rigorous testing as their larger counterparts. For this reason he asks, “Is local safer? I’m not against local, but it’s a buzzword. ‘Local’ is not on the same playing field as imported.”

And although the region’s larger retailers and big box stores may seem to have it all in the bag, their size can sometimes be a detriment to capitalizing on this very influential trend. “While trying to keep a community presence,” Maglio states, “mega-retailers are not set with the infrastructure to accommodate a single grower that can only service one or two stores’ volume demands. The regional chains are much more likely to capitalize on the local movement through their presence and interaction with multiple sources of supply.”

Some buyers and sellers don’t really consider the buy-local craze as a trend. “I don’t know if I would call ‘locally grown’ a trend,” says Comito, “because it’s more just a part of the business landscape. We’ve always had local grower relations starting back in the 1960s and 1970s. But people do want it to be grown nearby and fresher.”