It’s a wonderful season for healthy food

SOME PEOPLE SAY THEIR fruit and vegetable consumption is muted because their kitchen skills are lacking. They buy something, get it home, then don’t know what to do with it. So into the garbage it goes.

Others say the problem is price. They think fruit and vegetables are more expensive than junk.

Whatever the case, Canadians continue to eat fewer fruits and vegetables than they should. And it’s to our detriment, because there’s no question we are missing an opportunity to improve our health. It’s an old saw, but diet and exercise (and not smoking, of course) are still a key to unlocking the door to better health.

How are retailers helping? Well, they know local is where it’s at these days, and it seems like we’re seeing more local fruits and vegetables being promoted in season.

To consumers, local means fresh. For the most part, it also means healthy. But does “healthy” sell? Maybe it depends on price. That’s the latest experience in the UK. It’s a crazy market there, ever since Britain voted to leave

the EU. Brexit devalued the pound sterling, and prices typically rose, including the price of imported produce.

But in May, Tesco, Britain’s biggest supermarket, decided to take a radically different approach.

In what it calls its “Little Helps to Healthier Living” campaign, it actually dropped prices on more than 200 products it calls healthy, including a number of fruit and vegetables: carrots, pineapples and tomatoes among them. Very healthy choices, requiring very little preparation. And more economical than ever.

This is working out well for Tesco. In a sector where gains are measured incrementally and by shades of a percentage, its sales of its healthy products have actually increased 2.4 per cent. That’s huge in the face of a tough domestic economy.

It made me wonder if a similar approach would work here, with a goal of increasing consumption and improving sales for growers. We market on fresh and local. Usually, the two are intertwined; I think consumers see them as complementary. If it’s local, it’s fresh.

But if it’s fresh, it’s not too much of a stretch to position it as healthy, as well, particularly if we’re talking about fruit and vegetables.

Would retailers expect growers to help a little with price? I expect so. Can they? That’s a big question. Could volume be increased enough to make up the difference? And are you really getting ahead if you sell more but make the same profit?

Likely not in the short run. But something needs to catalyze a change in culture if, overall, consumption is going to increase.

On producers’ end, higher profitability may be realized with less labour and more automation. We know the many challenges faced by labour and the creative approaches besides automation that have been pursued, to try to compensate for the fact that many Canadians are not interested in working on fruit and vegetable operations.

We also know some approaches that might boost labour availability are not being well received, such as minimum wage hikes, which agriculture thinks will do more harm than good.

This spring I interviewed a fruit grower who is bent on competing with imports with superior local products. His produce is all handpicked. And while that drives up his cost of production, he thinks a well-heeled segment of the market will pay accordingly for fresh, local and healthy.

We’ll see. Meanwhile, let’s enjoy the abundance of fresh, local and healthy food on our doorstep. This is a wonderful season to live in Ontario.