Local Heroes

Successes

Local Heroes supported small, artisan producers with more than £50,000 worth of sales, issuing over 2,000 purchase orders and involving 500+ zero emission deliveries, with partners ZMove. Furthermore, 10% of every purchase led to more than £5,000 worth of fresh milk, eggs and butter being donated to the West End Foodbank.

Local Heroes was designed to be a business support tool, rather than a competitor to other box scheme initiatives. The decision to close the platform came in February 2021 when other privately-led box schemes were emerging alongside a shifting landscape where businesses were innovating in a way never seen before in order to generate sales.

The pilot scheme built on previous work from Newcastle University's involvement in the Strength2Food project, NICRE and FADNE modelled local supply chains and tested practical interventions for a more competitive, green and 'smart' food economy.

Challenges

The Local Heroes platform was launched because evidence showed that FADNE needed to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic and Brexit-related shocks to the region’s food industry. This context itself was challenging for two main reasons:

1. The Local Heroes platform exposed many of the weaknesses and inefficiencies in local supply chains. Over 150 disparate producers and products needed to be aggregated and consolidated to avoid individual car and van deliveries that would undermine the ambition for zero emissions.
2. The platform was also affected by rising product costs caused by supply chain challenges and the logistics constraints of only a five-mile delivery radius. Local Heroes inadvertently catered to a demographic from affluent suburbs of Newcastle who could afford these associated costs.

Future plans

Local Heroes North East currently hosts food and drink markets across the region, in Jesmond, Hebburn and Sunniside, Sunderland.

NICRE and FADNE are also exploring the innovation potential in rural areas of zero-emission food delivery services, including e-cargo bikes and cargo buses. Ongoing consumer research is taking place to understand market needs in service development, which will inform the launch of a trial project to bring a zero-emission delivery service to Northumberland.

Additionally, preliminary evidence from data from the original B2C Local Heroes initiative has led to a mapping exercise analysing the routes travelled by products from farm to fork, showing how smart coordination (at producer and consumer level) can help achieve optimal solutions.