Strategic alliances between food SME's and food retail shops

by: Laurids Siig Christensen, Taste of Denmark

Development in the food landscape in Denmark takes two directions. One is industrialised food production growing ever larger and developing into multinational and highly specialised companies transporting ingredients for processing over ever greater distances. The other is the development of food SME’s. These are often established by individuals driven by an idea, developing new products, producing food in new ways, or creating new business models.

Food SME’s in Denmark are the primary drivers for the development of local infrastructures of primary production, processing into food, marketing and location profile raising. The innovative individual behind a food SME will often not only have to pursue the development and production of the product but also single-handedly create the complete infrastructure needed to get the product from farm to fork. This without the wide range of specialisms available to larger organisations.

Taste of Denmark (www.smagenafdanmark.dk) is a network of food producing SME’s. It has now merged with the larger organisation FødevareDanmark (www.fodevaredanmark.dk). FødevareDanmark was hitherto an umbrella organization, primarily for food speciality retailers: butchers, bakeries, fish shops etc. There are a number of arguments for this merger. These include:
• The development of a stronger political voice for all Food SME’s.
• The creation of a synergistic relationship between the food producing and the retail SME’s to enable the more effective development of local marketing of local products.
One of the primary objectives of the new collaboration, to be pursued in the near future, is to develop better business to business relationships between food specialty producers and retail shops, respectively.

Contact information
Laurids Siig Christensen
E-mail: siig@horsekaer.dk
Phone: +45 40 15 53 01
Smagen af Danmark (www.smagenafdanmark.dk)