The current financial climate has made it harder to support our local farmers and buy local produce. Farmers often have to sell to supermarkets who will pay them far less for their goods, however a German farm has now made it a little easier for us to buy local produce.
The farm, Peter-und-Paul-Hof have proposed vending machines as future of selling local produce more efficiently. The farm has collaborated with vending manufacturer Stuewer and are now able to sell fresh milk, eggs, butter, cheese, potatoes and sausage in thirteen German towns and communities through the use of these vending machines. Springwise reports, "It's not a solution that sprung up overnight. Initially, Peter-und-Paul-Hof were operating a service delivering milk to their customers. Finding this too time-consuming, they began encouraging customers to collect the milk from fridges on their farm, which proved successful and inspired them to use vending machines as a more versatile solution.
The Regiomat machines can be placed outdoors 365 days a year as long as they're under a roof (some have even been placed alongside hiking trails in Switzerland), effectively giving locals a 24-hour farmers' market and farmers a lot more free time. By cutting out the middleman, this system also offers potential savings over retail stores. An update to the traditional farm stand that is beneficial to both farmers and local-loving consumers, this is definitely a concept we can see spreading to other parts of the world."
This is certainly an interesting innovation. We usually associate vending machines with junk food so the concept of buying high quality local produce from a machine is something that takes a little getting used to. However if it makes local produce more accessible, at a lower cost this can only be good news for farmers. If more farmers were to adopt this kind of scheme and it was successful it would have a more positive environmental effect as well with less transportation of food being needed by the supermarkets it could reduce carbon emissions.
I think this is something that if made affordable to local farmers, then I could see farms taking part on a global scale. It depends if they live in an area which has a population large enough to be profitable and cover rent on a vending machine, however I am sure there any farms in many different countries that could benefit from an innovation like this.
http://www.stuewer.de/automaten/regiomat/index.html
http://www.peter-paul-hof.de/
http://www.springwise.com/food_beverage/regiomat/
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