The Organic and Natural Food Distribution Market: Alternative or Niche?
Organization:
The collective at frigo needs to know more about its suppliers and natural food distribution more generally. Unlike other retailers, the frigo does not purchase or sell based on price.
It considers other variables in making food available to its members, such as: locality, labour standards and manners in agriculture, transformation, transportation, marketing, packaging, quality of food, accessibility, distribution of resources implied in food markets, etc. The frigo vert is, at the retail level, quite unique in its manner of distributing food and household stuffs on an anti-capitalist model.
However, most of its products come from for-profit suppliers. The frigo works not to buy from suppliers that espouse neo-liberal marketing models (such as MNCs) or those owned by corporate industrial food manufacturers (e.g. kraft, campbells, etc.). Nonetheless, there is a great deal of information that the frigo could use in making decisions about who to buy from and to what degree. This is a gap the student-researcher could fill.
Type of final product desired :
evaluation report / survey / ordering resource pamphlet
Desired length of final product:
10 pages analysis + tables / graphs
This project can be completed in one semsester and will require at the maximum to 5 hours or work per week.
About the organization:
Le Frigo Vert is an anti-capitalist grocery store. Its aim is to make food accessible and to encourage people to engage in a dignified relationship to both their natural and social environment. Plants and animals are people too. Le Frigo Vert operates as a collective and contributes to activist endeavors in and around town.