An analysis of marketing channels of local food in Scotland

Local food and its possibilities for addressing sustainable regional growth, food availability, accessibility and affordability has received considerable attention in the discussion on, and development of, the National Food and Drink Policy in Scotland. Despite this, there is limited empirical evidence about the characteristics of the local food sector in Scotland that allows inference of its potential to address the aforementioned points. Examples of aspects that need to be assessed are the sector’s economic size, how diversified it is, what its marketing channels are, their interest in growing, and what sort of constraints exist. The purpose of this paper is to explore one of the above mentioned questions, namely, the marketing channels used by local food enterprises. This is an interesting question because its answer allows us in some measure to infer the degree of entrepreneurship of the firms involved and their interest in expanding their business. In terms of methodology, the paper analyses the local food database for Scotland constructed in Watts et al (2010) by considering
the marketing channels used by product and by region.