Are Shorter Supply Chains Always Better?

Many consumers love to complain about the tasteless produce they find at the supermarket. It's described as uniform in appearance, maybe brightly colored, and completely lacking the taste that fruit and vegetables from childhood once had. Some people will add that we've traded good tasting food for food that can survive transportation. Sometimes they are correct, but I doubt very few of them have ever considered what it takes to get that delicate produce to their refrigerator. Even fewer are awestruck by the complicated logistics that makes year-round fresh produce a possibility.

Out-of-season supermarket produce is on one end of the spectrum. This morning, I spent an hour or so with fruit on the other end of the spectrum. I have several wild mulberry trees in my yard, meaning they were not purchased from a store and planted. They are decades old, they were not selected by a plant breeder, but they continue to fruit every year and I like to take advantage of that. So today I picked fresh mulberries and they are nothing like store-bought berries!

My Super Fresh Berries

My largest berries are a third of the size of store-bought mulberries. Most of them are 80% smaller than the big berries. The fruit is so delicate that they ruptured in my hands when I pick them. And the stems do not come off. Either you have to bite around the stem or lose the top of the fruit trying to discard it.

They taste great and most of my family is obsessed with eating as many as we can before the birds finish them off. If you like fresh produce, I can proudly say I have the freshest berries possible, but I also have fingers and nails that are stained dark purple. I have a leaking clamshell filled with my berries, sitting on a paper towel in my refrigerator because it is leaking juice from berries that are collapsing under their own weight. And I cannot convince my daughter to eat them with the stems. She informed me that she doesn't eat tree parts.

Looking at the juice stains, I am convinced that the only people that can eat these berries are people that come over and pick them with me. They cannot be packaged or stored.

A Happy Middle?

I've been contrasting my fresh berries with the produce processing and distribution center I stood in a few weeks ago. The fruit and vegetables are in individual containers that are stacked and palletized. They are moved around by forklifts and stored in rooms based on the optimal temperature. Then pallets are broken down and new pallets of mixed products are created to be shipped to individual stores. Some of the produce comes from around the country or the world, but some of it comes from local farmers. This is one of the places that produce is aggregated from thousands of farmers and distributed to hundreds of grocery stores. Damaged produce will be discarded and become part of the 30+% of food that turns into post-harvest food waste.

What if we minimized out the distribution step? An example of this supply chain might be one where the produce is harvested from a local farm and brought directly to a local store or maybe a farmers' market. That produce must still be sturdy enough to be harvested, either mechanically or by hand, sorted and maybe graded and then boxed up for the drive. Once in the store or at the farmers' market it must sit in a box and be handled by customers. Then those customers will carry the food home and eat it over the next few days.

The second journey is shorter, but even in these scenarios the breeders must prioritize some heartiness. Most consumers cannot go to a farm every day and collect what they need. They have to buy it from someone that is putting the produce on display for buyers to purchase. And no one is going to buy a container of leaky berries, even if they are delicious, because they are messy and attract bugs.

Even the Simplest Supply Chains are Complicated

There are many different pathways that food travels from a farm to where the end user can purchase it. Some supply chains are short and relatively simple, while others cover the globe and are immensely complicated. In both examples, the produce must be handled. Damaged produce lowers the amount that can be sold and increases the price that consumers pay and the amount of food waste produced. While, it's easy to see the benefits of super tasty, super fresh berries, today I spent some time seeing the challenges too.

I love picking the mulberries. They feel like a gift because I didn't plant the tree. But I also see the advantages of the raspberry plant from the garden center. It produces a large number of relatively uniform raspberries every season. They are sturdy enough they can be harvested from the plant and brought inside to be eaten over a few days. And most important to my daughter, she does not have to eat any tree parts.