Food Should Not the Last Line of the Event Budget

What a disappointing conference meal taught me about building markets for local food

I spent a lot of my personal money attending a professional conference last week.

Registration. Hotel. Travel. Meals. Time away from work.

Like most people attending a conference, I considered all of that part of the investment. Organizations spend money to bring people together because we believe something valuable happens when people share a room.

And then lunchtime comes.

Suddenly, food becomes something to manage.

How cheaply can we feed this many people? What is easiest for the venue? What fits into the remaining event budget? Can we get something delivered?

I found myself frustrated by the food at this particular conference. Really frustrated.

But somewhere between Des Moines and home, I realized my frustration wasn't really about lunch.

It was about the opportunity we keep missing.

Food is infrastructure

Every person at that conference had to eat.

Every person at your board retreat has to eat.

People eat at trainings, festivals, meetings, fundraisers, conferences, workshops, employee appreciation events and community gatherings.

We know food is a basic human need. We talk about food access. We talk about food insecurity. We talk about supporting farmers and small businesses.

Then we plan an event and treat food like an expense sitting at the bottom of the spreadsheet.

What if we stopped doing that?

What if we treated the event food budget as purchasing power?

Because somebody is getting that money.

The question is who.

Follow the money

This question has become central to our work at GOTURSIX:

How does local food move? Who is buying? Where is the money going?

We have been asking those questions as part of our work across Missouri's South Central Ozarks.

The more we listen, the more I wonder whether one of the greatest opportunities for rural food producers isn't convincing individual consumers to completely change how they shop.

Maybe we should also look at the money communities are already spending.

A chamber luncheon already needs food.

A nonprofit training already needs food.

A hospital meeting already needs food.

A conference already needs food.

A community event already needs food.

A grant-funded workshop already needs food.

Those aren't hypothetical markets.

Those are existing food dollars.

What if we helped move some of them?

Imagine a rural organization planning an event with a $500 food budget.

They could place the entire $500 with the easiest conventional vendor.

Or imagine there were a program that said:

Put $250 of your existing budget toward food produced in this region, and we'll match it with another $250 to help you purchase from qualified local food producers.

Now we haven't asked the organization to double its food budget.

We've doubled what its existing dollars can do.

A local producer gets a paying customer.

An organization gets to serve something connected to the place where it operates.

Participants discover food and businesses they may not have known existed.

The producer gets an opportunity to test capacity, pricing, packaging and demand.

And some of those buyers may come back without the subsidy.

That last part matters.

The goal should not be permanently subsidized local food.

The goal should be building a market.

But somebody has to build the bridge

"Buy local" sounds simple until somebody has to do it.

Can this producer legally sell this product in this setting?

Do they have the right licensing?

Can they produce enough?

How should it be packaged?

Do they have insurance?

Can they invoice an organization?

Can they accept a purchase order?

Can they meet the requirements attached to grant or public dollars?

Can the buyer document the expense appropriately?

Suddenly the gap between a person making an incredible product and an organization spending $500 on food looks much bigger.

This is what we mean at GOTURSIX when we talk about the Missing Middle.

The food exists.

The buyer exists.

The money exists.

The distance between them is often the problem.

What if readiness itself became something we could build?

Instead of telling small producers, "Come back when you're ready," what if communities helped them become ready?

That could mean understanding regulations, establishing appropriate business practices, learning institutional purchasing requirements, getting insurance, developing pricing, increasing production capacity, or simply figuring out which steps apply to their particular product.

A cucumber does not travel the same regulatory and business pathway as bread.

Bread does not follow the same pathway as an egg.

And a producer selling twelve jars at a farmers market faces a different challenge when someone asks whether they can supply food for 75 people next month.

There is an entire ecosystem between I make this and we can buy this from you.

We can build that ecosystem.

Start with one event

We have an opportunity to test some of this thinking through Project Pickle, GOTURSIX's community-engagement and producer-development work within the South Central Missouri Foodshed Project.

For our first community workshop, private funding is allowing us to purchase local food for the experience.

That matters.

We aren't asking producers to donate their work in exchange for "exposure."

We're buying food.

We're learning who can supply it.

We're learning what makes purchasing difficult.

We're learning what buyers need.

We're learning what producers need.

And we're putting those lessons back into the work.

Maybe that becomes a model.

Maybe organizations commit part of their existing event-food budget and community investment matches it.

Maybe producers move through a readiness process that helps them become easier for institutional and organizational buyers to purchase from.

Maybe chefs help translate what grows here into menus people get excited about.

Maybe grants don't replace markets.

Maybe grants help markets meet.

That's a hypothesis worth testing.

Walking the talk requires looking at the whole room

Supporting local food systems isn't something we do during the food-system portion of the agenda.

Food is already in the room.

It's on the conference table.

It's at the board retreat.

It's in the workshop budget.

It's at the employee picnic.

It's at the fundraiser.

It's at the community meeting.

Every one of those meals represents a purchasing decision.

So perhaps the next time we plan an event, the question isn't simply:

"What are we going to feed everybody?"

Maybe we ask:

"What could this meal make possible?"

Because if we're serious about creating opportunity for rural food producers, we don't have to invent every market from scratch.

Some of the market is already sitting in our budgets.

We just have to build the bridge between the cucumber and the pickle.