The concept of locally produced food is by nature a very dynamic concept. The self-sustained household would of course provide the most locally produced supplies there are, but since the market would be so limited (i.e. me and my wife), the fixed and overhead costs would be out of proportion to big to us to bear. The concept locally produced will only be economically sustainable if the market defined as local is large enough to create a demand for an efficiently scaled production.
I Sweden, the largest organization for ecological certification (KRAV) describes a geographical radius of 250 km as a reasonable measure used by other actors. But that only means that the final product is manufactured within that radius, not that the crop in the cereals was grown there, or the cattle in the meatballs where raised there. If we control the whole process from goat feed to cheese, and are doing that on the same very local farm, wouldn’t that be more locally produced than meatballs made from Argentinian and Irish beef and sold as Swedish locally produced meatballs, as long as the cheese is sold on a market closer than Argentina or Ireland?
So if the concept of ”locally produced” is stretchy, we can be just as stretchy when finding a market for our locally produced products. Since the concept is neither environmental nor geographical, ”locally produced” should be regarded as a crude economical concept.
Turning the concept towards an economical viewpoint, we get the question: How big market can we reach with our locally produced food still being locally produced? We have a minimum of a 250 km radius from our farm, that by all means is considered local.
Well OK, we got Malmö, Copenhagen and Gothenburg, that’s good, but half of our geographical market is water, and we are missing densely populated parts of Poland and Germany. All our family and friends in Stockholm wouldn’t get our locally produced cheeses, neither would ferry connected towns of Klaipeda and Gdynia/Gdansk/Sopot, where food from just across the Baltic sea could be seen as both local and exotic.
So what’s the actual population in this circle? Eurostat, the statistical office of the EU, provides detailed population data. I should probably create an API-request to get the most accurate result, but a quick mapping of their pre-defined regions (I had no idea that Europe was divided in NUTS, only that a few of them lives here) on NUTS-2 level will be good enough.
The 250 km circle gives a market of approximately 11 million people.
| Hovedstaden | 1,768,125 |
| Östra Mellansverige | 1,621,566 |
| Sjælland | 820,480 |
| Småland med öarna | 826,243 |
| Södra Sverige | 4,211,985 |
| Västsverige | 1,942,677 |
| Total Result | 11,191,076 |
Let’s reach out a little, and double the radius. 500 km is the new proposed local market.
Now we’re talking! Stockholm, Oslo, Hamburg and Berlin. Those are some densely populated regions. Along with northern Poland, Denmark, Lithuania and Latvia, we have quite a few local mouths to reach. 43.4 million people to be precise (or maybe not that precise, since Latvia and Lietuva only are 1 NUT each, I counted the whole countries. But I forgot the Norwegian NUT Sörlandet, so that will make up for some of it).
| Hovedstaden | 1,768,125 |
| Latvija | 3,972,192 |
| Lietuva | 5,842,524 |
| Lüneburg | 1,677,715 |
| Mecklenburg-Vorpommern | 3,198,276 |
| Midtjylland | 1,282,750 |
| Nordjylland | 582,632 |
| Oslo og Akershus | 1,232,854 |
| Östra Mellansverige | 1,621,566 |
| Pomorskie | 2,271,559 |
| Schleswig-Holstein | 5,661,728 |
| Sjælland | 820,480 |
| Småland med öarna | 826,243 |
| Södra Sverige | 4,211,985 |
| Stockholm | 2,198,044 |
| Syddanmark | 1,205,728 |
| Västsverige | 1,942,677 |
| Warminsko-Mazurskie | 1,418,541 |
| Zachodniopomorskie | 1,688,486 |
| Total Result | 43,424,105 |
To view the market as a function of geography and population would of course be to simplify a lot. Culture, communications, currency and concentration of cheese-lovers (the 5 C:s of cheese marketing) are important factors too. But one thing that these figures points out, is that the potential market for physical products, never could have been the same if we had decided to stay in the Stockholm region. In fact, The funny thing is that in Stockholm, we lived in a crowded place, in a sparsely populated region. In Blekinge, it may go several days without seeing other people, even as we have 40 millions of them around the corner.