Local Food? Let’s Get Real.
Strong demand for local — from food to finance — presents game-changing business and community development opportunity. But how do we move from general interest to specific action? What steps will make the most difference? And who will take them?
Explore these questions with a “value chain” approach.
Workshops and Coaching
Patty Cantrell, Regional Food Solutions LLC, offers value chain workshops and coaching for groups of entrepreneurs, organizations, and innovators ready to seize local potential and strengthen their region.
Applying the WealthWorks framework, Cantrell helps groups:
- Identify and select specific, significant, scalable market opportunities that suit and support the region.
- Map existing and potential players across all the value chain functions needed to seize the opportunity — from production inputs to seller inventory and all the processing, aggregation, distribution, and other support in-between.
- Zero in on gaps, bottlenecks, and under-utilized resources that keep needed market linkages from functioning well or occurring at all.
- Build practical business-to-business strategies for building value chain functionality, tapping the self-interest, shared interest, and common interest that each player brings.
- Chart a course to market that is based on leverage points the process identifies, the business relationships this approach builds, and the investment it attracts.
Patty Cantrell, Regional Food Solutions LLC, brings a career in regional food system development to this work. She is trained in the WealthWorks value chain approach (more at WealthWorks.org] and a co-author of the seminal USDA publication Food Value Chains: Creating Shared Value to Enhance Marketing Success.
