What is a local food system?

This Guide from FARMWISE Indiana is designed to facilitate successful partnerships between local food suppliers and wholesale buyers. While this Guide may seem like a lot of information, each section is designed to help avoid the common pitfalls that can occur in communications and negotiations between buyers and suppliers.

Sourcing from local farms and food businesses is a known priority for IU Dining’s leadership and, over the years, they have made this commitment clear by investing time and dollars to build direct relationships with farmers and food producers and identifying and prioritizing local suppliers within their distribution networks.

School food procurement is one of the most consistent and high-volume food purchasing relationships in any community. For rural Indiana districts like Richland-Bean Blossom, local sourcing decisions made inside one food service office can have immense impact on nearby farms.

Selling into wholesale markets is an opportunity for producers to streamline their markets and potentially achieve more stability than with farmers markets and other direct to consumer opportunities.

The FARMWISE Team spent over a year interviewing buyers in Indiana and Kentucky to learn more about what motivates them to source locally grown and produced foods. From school food service directors to chefs, dieticians to business owners, we gathered background details on the many motivating factors that lay within each connection made and each meal served.