Less than three percent of Rhode Island food is locally sourced, report finds

Less than three percent of Rhode Island’s food, beverage and alcohol expenditures are directed towards local and regional products, the recent Regional Food Count 2022 report revealed. 

The report, released earlier this month by the New England Food System Planners Partnership, is part of a broader effort to increase local and regional food consumption in New England. 

“We hope to show that choosing local and regional food over products from far away … is helping New England build a more equitable and resilient food system,” Ellen Kahler, executive director of the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund and spokesperson for the project, wrote in an email to The Herald. 

To conduct the study, researchers sent surveys to over 160 food distributors in the state, including grocery and food retailers, educational institutions and correctional facilities.

But only 8.8% of receivers responded to the surveys, reflecting the fact that the study is “necessarily a work in progress,” according to the report.

Full-service and fast food restaurants, for example, were excluded from the survey due to “resource constraints.” Data on certain food products (such as milk) were also unavailable to researchers. In combination with the low survey response rate, these factors mean that the local food expenditure figures were “likely underestimates.” 

These challenges are not unusual in food consumption research, explained Dawn King, director of undergraduate studies and senior lecturer at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society.

Privately-owned food distributors like restaurants and grocery stores — which contribute to over half of the state’s food expenditures — are less likely to report data, King explained. Smaller grocery stores and restaurants are also less likely to keep comprehensive data, while larger stores, though often keeping accurate records, “like to keep that information tight to their chest,” King said. 

Exploring alternative methods of incentivizing partnerships based on “mutual trust” between researchers and food distributors would greatly benefit the field, King said. 

But building “trusted relationships” in order to acquire local sales data “takes time,” Kahler said. She pointed to Vermont, which has been able to collect more reliable and comprehensive data with each iteration of their local food count. 

Though food accounts for 20% of Rhode Island’s GDP, the state is not often known for its agricultural output, explained Alison Macbeth, a food strategy project manager at Rhode Island Commerce. For this reason, there has historically been limited research on the state’s local food production.

According to Macbeth, the partnership behind the report aims to achieve 30% local and regional food consumption by 2030.

Earlier drafts of the project plan proposed a goal of 50% local consumption by 2050. But these ambitions would require Rhode Islanders to make drastic diet changes like eliminating beef consumption while increasing seafood consumption. The original plan also estimated these changes would result in 30% more deforestation due to the state’s lack of farmland.

“That’s why we need to start thinking about this regionally,” said King. She highlighted the need for different, neighboring states to specialize in different produce and industries. “We have to work as a group sometimes,” King added.

King also stressed that the successes of Rhode Island’s food systems should be amplified, citing local food co-op Farm Fresh Rhode Island as “one of the first successful food hubs in the nation.”

But increasing local food consumption also introduces other problems. Chief among them is economic equity and accessibility, the report highlighted. 

While farmers’ markets might pose financial barriers, King said, SNAP Benefit programs at food hubs like Farm Fresh have partially alleviated the problem.

“It is clear that sustained and collaborative action, along with significant and coordinated investment of resources, will be required to meet (our consumption) goal,” Kahler wrote. Though much progress still needs to be made, she is confident that such developments are possible within a short period of time. 

According to Macbeth, a new food strategy plan, which will take the report’s findings into consideration, is set to be published early next year. The food count report will also be repeated every two years, with the next volume set to be published in 2026.