Phil Coles, then a grad student and now an econ professor at Lehigh, did some nice work figuring out how wholesale buyers (e.g. supermarkets) think about the value of local.  He met the buyers at the New York Produce Show, a big gathering of produce buyers and sellers who are eager to make deals.

The usual questions would be “would you pay more for local?” or “Is it ok that local looks a little different from what you are used to?”

Coles notes that the problem with surveying this group is that they are in deal-making mode and the last thing they want to do is tip a questioner off to what they value. So he had to come up with some ways of gauging their buying behavior despite this obstacle.

We learned that buyers could tell the difference in appearance between a canonic California-grown broccoli and an eastern-adapted variety raised in New York. Both look good, but people have very fixed ideas of what it should look like.

Importantly, we learned that buyers would favor the local supply if they were told where it came from.

Wholesale sellers may not get a price premium, but the many broccoli growers who supply New York city and neaby big markets can use the local source to their advantage (even if they buyers won’t tell them that.)

The paper is Produce Buyer Quality Perception, Preference, and Local Foods: The Case of East Coast Broccoli in the Northeast  by Philip C. Coles, Nicole Amerling, Miguel I. Gómez and Thomas Björkman. Publshed in HortScience 60: 2317 – 2320 (2025) DOI: 10.21273/HORTSCI18974-25

https://journals.ashs.org/view/journals/hortsci/60/12/article-p2317.xml