There is growing recognition that the direct marketing initiatives favored by many local food activists and proponents often lack the capacity to meet rapidly expanding consumer demand for local food. To address these needs, some food systems researchers have identified a role for ‘transitional’ food systems that piggyback on the pre-existing, conventional local food system infrastructure, while moving toward the social and economic benefits of direct marketing. This paper uses a value chain model (based on business management studies and adapted to the context of agrifood enterprises) as a framework for investigating how actors who are accustomed to working within the logic of the traditional produce industry incorporate local food into their overall operations. Using a qualitative comparative case study approach, the paper examines how features of the value chain structure and governance mechanisms operate in two food distribution networks that are transitioning toward localization in a rural and an urban region of Pennsylvania, respectively. Case study analysis focuses on conventional wholesale produce distributors as the link between local producers and local buyers. Interviews with the distributors, producers and buyers reveal the sources and outcomes of challenges affecting how the distributors organize their purchasing and selling of local produce. Network practices, in turn, have equity implications as distributors struggle to pay producers enough to maintain their economic viability, while still making local produce accessible to a wide range of consumers. Policy-makers and practitioners seeking to support the ‘scaling up’ of local and regional food systems should consider targeted development of technical infrastructure in processing and distribution, as well as outreach on appropriate shared ownership models. Future research should be longitudinal to determine the longer-term role and contribution of the conventional food system infrastructure in transitioning to more sustainable local and regional food systems.

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The challenges of meeting growing consumer demand for local food, especially from larger, institutional buyers, has sparked many to look beyond direct marketing to alternative models of produce aggregation and distribution. Value chains that incorporate conventional food system infrastructure are one such model for local food system development, but little research has studied their functioning and outcomes. Arrangements where conventional produce distributors handle local food can be viewed as "hybrid" food value chains, since they include both local and global resources, and combine conventional food system infrastructure with the more alternative goal of building local food systems. This qualitative study examines three hybrid food value chains that revolve around con

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Public-private partnerships between supermarket retailers and development agencies help small-scale producers reach growing domestic markets in developing countries. Drawing on qualitative data that focuses on relationships between producers, development agencies, and Wal-Martowned supermarkets in Honduras, the research presented here demonstrates how, by introducing food safety standards to development agencies' outreach efforts, but without necessarily certifying producers or offering a price premium, Wal-Mart uses these standards to simultaneously differentiate production practices by promoting quality, while maintaining a standardized market. As a result, the responsibility and costs for incentivizing growers to change their practices is shifted to nongovernmental organizations. Therefore, although an extensive body of literature describes standards and thirdparty certification systems as the means for corporations to control production practices, this research indicates that public-private partnerships are a new vehicle by which corporations can influence agricultural production practices. In addition, this article argues that the inclusion of food safety standards in development projects leads to the conflation of food safety and sustainability, without adequately interrogating which agroecological processes food safety standards include and exclude. Therefore, retailers' private food safety standards dominate how sustainability is perceived and practiced in the development context.

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With its corresponding concepts of societal, territorial, and network embeddedness, firm embeddedness offers a theoretical framework for analyzing how retailers develop strategies and business models determined by their home country context, but also adapted to new places, consumers, and networks. This paper uses firm embeddedness to examine food retailer adaptation within a changing home market, focusing on Wal-Mart’s efforts to implement local produce sourcing in the U.S. Growing consumer interest in local food has sufficiently shifted the competitive landscape within the U.S. market that Wal-Mart and other food retailers have sought to incorporate local produce into their operations. This paper asks whether Wal-Mart’s core lean retailing strategy facilitates or impedes such efforts to localize its U.S. produce supply chains. Qualitative field research conducted in 2011–2012 in one U.S. region centered on semi-structured interviews with 27 fresh fruit and vegetable producers involved in Wal-Mart’s local produce supply chains and 20 representatives of organizations facilitating commercial relationships between local growers and Wal-Mart. We find that the lean retailing model developed by Wal-Mart in response to historical circumstances in U.S. retailing and central to its present global retail dominance also limits Wal-Mart’s ability to engage in the bottom-up learning and adaptation to local contexts necessary for adjusting to the new competitive environment of local food. Wal-Mart’s centralized management and distribution systems, practices of cutting out intermediaries, and emphasis on standardization all presented some barriers to establishing the territorial and network embeddedness that could facilitate adaptation. However, we conclude that rather than simply failing to adapt to the challenges of localization, Wal-Mart applied a hybrid strategy in its local produce sourcing program. This hybrid strategy combined lean retailing—Wal-Mart’s traditional basis of competition—with selected, rather than comprehensive aspects of localization.