At our upcoming Driftless Region Food and Farm Project meeting on Thursday, March 18, we hope to discuss strategies that enable food entrepreneurs to meet the growing demand in the Driftless region for locally produced food.  To guide our conversation, we plan to refer to a recent report published by UW-Madison CIAS, Scaling Up: Meeting the Demand for Local Food.  Click here to download a full copy.

In the report, the authors identify eight common challenges faced by local food entrepreneurs and suggest some innovations to meet the challenges.  They include:

1. Controlling for product quality and consistency
2. Seasonality
3. Matching supply and demand
4. Communicating food origins and product differentiation
5. Supply chain infrastructure
6. Securing capital
7. Capacity development
8. Information flow and transparency

If you are either facing these kinds of  challenges or potentially have identified innovative solutions to them, we hope you will join us on March 18 and share your experiences and insights.  We also ask you to begin the conversation by commenting below.