Supply Chains and Local Economies

What impact does a local supply chain have on the quality of life and products that a region can produce? Since yesterday was National Supply Chain Day, this topic is top of mind for me.

I am in awe of how materials and products that make our lives better move across oceans and continents to show up at my door. The logistics, people and innovation that run this industry are astounding! And while I'm truly grateful for this, there are some unintended consequences that come with it: undermining social capital, weakening community resilience and making our world a lot less interesting.

Myrtle & Cypress Coffeehouse is a local cafe where I am a co-owner. One of the commitments we made when we opened in the fall of 2018 was to source as much as we could from a 50 mile radius. We were gleefully optimistic that we could operate as a radically local business.

In the early days when our supply needs were small, we succeeded in sourcing about 75 percent of our products from within 100 miles! I'm still so proud of that! As we grew, however, we realized that our small, local providers wouldn't be able to keep up with our demand. We also learned that the accepted definition for "local" is a 500 mile radius. We understood why and gave ourselves a little slack. Now, going on 8 years in business, we still source a significant amount of our supplies from within that 500 mile radius. When we can't, we look for suppliers that have a deep commitment to their local economies so that our money continues to invest in real people in real places, like our coffee importer De La Finca. We chose De La Finca as our importer, precisely because of the impact founder Nelson Amador and his team aim to have in their community and the partners they work with.

All of this sourcing local for our small business takes a lot of time and work. We're often purchasing only one or two items from each vendor. We get our honey from Fathead farms and our Tea from Artemis Teas. We've purchased our maple syrup from Davis Sugar Shack for 8 years and now that he's retired, we're looking for a new supplier. Our retail shelves are stocked with local artisans and we use local companies for services like rugs and rags and paper goods. Every time we place an order, we're calling a different person.

Most people would look at what we do and tell us we're crazy and wasting time and money. (They're not wrong.) And yet we keep doing it anyway. Why? for two reasons:

1. When I order honey, I'm calling Kathy. When I order maple syrup, I'm calling Dennie. When I order tea I'm buying from my neighbor Andrea. And when I'm stocking our retail shelf I'm working with my friends Ali and Ariana and Jen and Tommy and Luca. Every order I place builds social capital and community resilience.

2. Our customers deserve the best quality of products that our region has to offer. They deserve something that comes from the land that they live on. They deserve something that is connected to their lived experience rather than some unknown and imagined world somewhere far away. Every order I place adds flavor, nuance and interest to the experience of our customers and team.

Not too long ago I was emailing back and forth with a national food supplier. They had stopped in several times to woo us with their products, but they just didn't carry anything we needed. Later, when I was looking for a more efficient way to get the gluten free flour we use I wondered if they could help me. The short answer was yes, but because it is a premium product, it was going to cost 25% more than what we were already paying by doing the hard work of sourcing directly. This experience put a spotlight on the paradox that we experience in the American food supply chain. Even though we have so many choices, much of it is bland and boring because time and cost savings force owners and operators toward the lowest common denominator.

Let's look at food as an example. Most restaurants in the United States are getting their raw ingredients from a national supplier like Sysco or US Foods because it's the most efficient way to get the food supplies they need. The restaurants business goals are to keep their cost of goods and labor low so that they can turn a profit on the food the consumers purchase. If food costs get too high, they have to raise prices and the average consumer gets angry and goes somewhere cheaper. So they do what is most logical: they purchase the best quality they can for a cheaply as they can. But quality isn't cheap. Unique and local isn't cheap. Nutrient dense isn't cheap. What is cheap? Industrialized farming, harvesting, processing, packaging and shipping. What we get with national and international food supply chains isn't interesting local flavors. We get low quality, commodity food whose cost input comes less and less from people and healthy soil as it does from machines, logistics and transportation. How do supply chains keep costs down? Streamlining. We don't get the unique size and shape of a locally grown apple. We get a uniform shape and standardized varietals that ship well. These foods are cheap. These are the foods that can be used to turn a profit at a restaurant. And these foods are boring because they don't taste like any specific place. These foods weaken community resilience because they depend on global politics, weather and supply chain. These foods undermine social capital because they disconnect the products we consume from the real human beings responsible for their productions.

I have a dream that supply chain could become what has been called a value chain: A supply chain that is built on relationships and local networks rather than pure logistics. That the industry that keeps the products in our world moving and connected could evolve out of the industrial age metaphor of machine into an ecological metaphor of ecosystem. And I dream that local economies will build their own value chains that grow and interconnect with other value chains and become a vast ecosystem web of locally driven, human centric systems.