Local Roots

THE CHALLENGE

Peterborough’s aspir­a­tion to become UK’s Envir­on­ment Cap­it­al: Food secur­ity is a key chal­lenge for all UK cit­ies as our pop­u­la­tion grows, but there is an increas­ing aware­ness that we must start pro­du­cing food sus­tain­ably.

Peter­bor­ough is sur­roun­ded by some of the UK’s most pro­duct­ive arable land. Tra­di­tion­ally res­id­ents were able to source food from loc­al farm­ers. Nowadays dir­ect links between pro­du­cers and end users are very poor. The food ends up being trans­por­ted for miles to be pro­cessed and packed before it’s sold.

After com­plet­ing mar­ket research in Peter­bor­ough, Loc­al Roots found that even though prices are buoy­ant for qual­ity loc­al products, there is still the demand in being able to pro­cure loc­ally rather than find­ing a cheap­er deal from their cur­rent sup­pli­ers.

THE SOLUTION

Urb­an grow­ing schemes have been evolving in recent years to har­ness new tech­no­lo­gies and respond to loc­al food chal­lenge. Loc­al Roots is the first com­pany in Peter­bor­ough to tackle this prob­lem by sup­ply­ing cater­ing out­lets with food grown with min­im­um food miles.

There are two strands to their work:

1) To grow high qual­ity food for loc­al cater­ing out­lets with­in a 20-mile radi­us of Peter­bor­ough

2) To provide a scal­able turn­key sys­tem that: Uses cur­rently unused urb­an space for food pro­duc­tion — redu­cing food miles and increas­ing qual­ity.

THE STRATEGY

Loc­al Roots received £20,000 in the second round of fund­ing to develop their com­mer­cial salad-grow­ing busi­ness from sea­son­al pro­duc­tion to all year round sup­ply.

There are plans to use the £20,000 to set up the infra­struc­ture to enable all year round, envir­on­ment­ally friendly and sus­tain­able grow­ing in Peter­bor­ough.

This will then enable Loc­al Roots to build on their cur­rent pro­gress and pilot the pro­posed fran­chise pack­age so oth­ers can do the same in their own area.