“A healthy, varied, quality diet, also traceable, must be within everyone’s reach and is not today”denounced the Prime Minister in his general policy speech on 1is october. This is not for lack of measures in this direction. Since the General Assembly on Food in 2018, three laws, EGalim 1, then 2 in 2021 and 3 in 2023, have followed one another, each time to promote good nutrition and support French agriculture.
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Las. “Short circuit” purchases, minimizing unnecessary transport and cascades of intermediaries, still remain a privilege reserved for rural people living near agricultural operations and a minority of informed and involved city dwellers. Is this inevitable?
Our research carried out in Noisy-le-Grand (Seine-Saint-Denis) shows that the demand for local products (i.e. produced within a radius of 100 to 150 kilometers around the place of marketing) is present in varied backgrounds, notably the middle and working classes living on the outskirts of cities. “I’m already trying as hard as I can to buy French”explained a young mother to us. “Local products are generally of better quality, fresher, and they have not traveled across the entire planet before arriving on our plate”observed another, continuing: “Eating local pushes us to eat seasonally, to avoid Spanish tomatoes that are tasteless and full of water. » On average, according to an OpinionWay survey from October 2021, 36% of consumers would like to eat local.
Managerial challenge
But this type of purchase actually appeared to be incompatible with the way the families we studied made their purchases. More than three quarters of French people do their shopping in supermarkets and hypermarkets. In Noisy-le-Grand, as in many suburbs, the figure is even higher. However, local products currently constitute on average less than 2% of the food offering in these supermarkets and hypermarkets, according to the’2022 study by the IRI distributor panel.
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Buy in specialized networks? Most of the families interviewed expressed their reluctance to increase the number of places of purchase, for reasons of transport cost and convenience. The majority were not ready to change their habits and were not aware of the existence of specialized brands, but they said they regretted not finding local products, raw or prepared, on the shelves of the hypermarkets they frequented. .
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