ABSTRACT
In recent years, Europe and North America have witnessed a significant growth in new forms of food retailing whereby fresh and high-quality produce is sold directly by the producers themselves. The most visible examples are the development of farmers’ markets (FM) in many urban locations, but there has also been a revitalization of street and covered municipal markets as well as the growth of other new retail arrangements such as farm shops, box schemes, community supported agriculture, forms of co-operative bulk purchase, and so on. The common feature of these initiatives is that they serve to reconnect food producers and consumers in a new and direct way, a relationship largely severed in recent years by the dominance of corporate multiple retailers. The term “alternative food networks” is often used as a
label to cover this wide variety of innovative forms of production and sales (Renting et al. 2003; Goodman 2003).
