Organic Foods Are about Health as Much as Knowledge

Organic produce, long considered a marginal, elite niche by global agribusiness players and average consumers alike, has now caused a discontinuity in the traditional system of food and beverages production. While the traditional food sector is facing a contraction in consumption (-3%), bio foods have been growing steadily for several years (+7,3% for packaged items, +8% for fresh produce). Organic food seems to meet the demand for higher food safety and transparency, while its foundational concepts (sustainability, fairness, healthiness) respond to the new social and moral needs of the consumer. The founding principle of the food industry has always been to supply good-quality products at affordable prices, in large quantities, always and everywhere immediately available for purchase. For the industry, the quality and value of the product had lain in the transformation process, from the sourcing of crops to the standardization of manufacturing, with the aim of guaranteeing safety, repeatability of process and tastiness of product.
This philosophy, sustained by rigid norms, had numerous, undeniable advantages, but created a unidirectional relation between producer and consumer, the latter reduced to a passive, scarcely informed and involved player, other than for commercial advertising. As agriculture became ever more standardized and dependent on fertilizers and pesticides, value shifted from raw materials and labor to industrial process and economies of scale, giving life to industrial agribusiness giants, and leading to the depreciation of the value of food.
Today, the existing mammoth-sized producers, packagers and distributors seem in antithesis with the needs of new consumers.
Socio-cultural change displays evident signs of a countertrend in demand. Active participation of the customer in production and service processes is widespread and has been widely studied. New digital technologies push toward a shortening of the value chain and enable the citizen-consumer to seek active involvement and participation in the food system.
The new, active consumer is ready to modify his/her consumption style as a function of information and knowledge: the know-who has become as fundamental as the know-how, i.e. it expresses the need for more food safety and healthiness, by putting the human being back at the center, beyond the machine of industrial process. Also, agricultural producers take a central role in business models originating from organic/biological food, but they cannot be valorized at the end of the value chain if distribution models do not change: it's a risk for the traditional production-distribution model but also an opportunity to renew its supply chain.

Large-scale retailing also has the opportunity to renew what it offers on the shelves. Large-scale distribution is underestimating much of the intrinsic value of local organic food, but the so-called principle of zero-kilometer foods, as much as it is desirable, is often incompatible with today's styles of consumption. The evidence from research studies points rather toward a zero-day concept. Nutrients essential to the human body like phenols and antioxidants degrade after picking and storage. If too much time elapses from the moment of harvesting the food crop and its consumption, we risk ending up purchasing little more than fiber, sugar, and water. If applied, zero-day foods could cause a major change in supply chain models and in the way the consumer views a certain food as healthy and nutritious.