The Locavore’s Dilemma

Everything with successful food, beverage and value-added farm businesses starts with a business model optimized for profitability. The story of how the business will make money is of utmost importance when raising money.

Part of telling this story is demonstrating the size of the market of people that will buy your products, and the limited amount of people in many populations around the United States creates the “locavore’s dilemma.”

This underscores the importance of using market research data to inform how big the market size is and what people are actually purchasing and where. For example, as of this posting only 3% of people nationally are willing to purchase grassfed meat, so staying local means that your total potential market size locally is only 3% of the local population. Businesses need to be strategic about their go to market strategy and how big of a market they can participate in given their business model.