DESARROLLO DEL SCG EN TC

Interviewing café, pub and restaurant owners gave me an insight into the structures operating within the food and tourism sector. However, to complete the picture, it was essential that I also looked at sourcing issues from a food producer’s viewpoint. Once again, food producers were asked to give their definition of local food and their impressions of the characteristics of the region’s food industry. They were then asked to provide details of production methods, ingredient sourcing and marketing, before going on to discuss where they had chosen to sell their products and why. Interview schedules for the food producers are given in Appendix 2.

These questions enabled me to get a better idea of how food and place interacted with tourism. Most importantly, they also provided further

information on the structures affecting the sector. For example, in relation to wholesale, many producers stated that they found delivery to be difficult and costly, particularly if their customers were ordering small amounts of product. In such cases, producers were sometimes forced to introduce a minimum order or a high charge for delivery. Another solution was to tell customers that they would only deliver on a set day every other week. There was also debate about the best ways to sell products, with some producers favouring the higher prices available through direct sale at farmers’ markets, while other

producers preferred to get into supermarkets in the local area – a decision that resulted in lower profit margins but a higher volume of sales.

Again, my aim was to conduct interviews with as wide a range of local food producers as possible. In order to do this, I selected interviewees to represent the principal types of product available in each region4. In the case of the Lake District, the main products were as follows:

 Bakery products

 Drinks

 Meat and dairy products

 Jams and preserves

Exmoor had a slightly different range of locally produced foods. The main types were as follows:

 Confectionery

 Meat and dairy products

 Drinks

 Jams, preserves and honey

 Fish

I used these major product types to ensure that I selected a diverse range of producers – giving me 17 interviewees in total (8 from the Lake District and 9 from Exmoor). Appendix 1 provides profiles of these interviewees and Tables 3 and 4 show how interviewees were distributed by study area and product type.

Table 3. Lake District interviewees

Product type Number of interviewees

Bakery products 2

Meat and dairy products 2

Drinks 2

Jams and preserves 2

Table 4. Exmoor interviewees

Product type Number of interviewees

Confectionery 1

Meat and dairy products 3

Drinks 2

Jams, preserves and honey 2

Fish 1

When recruiting participants, I chose to concentrate on businesses that made a feature of their locality. There were several reasons for this. Firstly, although every firm must be geographically local to somewhere as a result of its

physical location, a key argument of this thesis is that ‘localness’ is about more than just physical proximity to place. For example, the Nestlé factory is located in York and yet, although it contributes to the local economy by providing jobs, few people would claim that Nestlé chocolate is ‘local’

Yorkshire chocolate. Instead, it could be argued that what makes a company ‘local’ is its decision to use aspects of its region’s geography, culture and traditions as a marketing tool (Boniface, 2003, Enteleca Research and Consultancy, 2001). In short, ‘local’ companies are able to claim that their product is unique and special not only because it has been made in a

particular place, but also because it has been produced on a small-scale using a special recipe or production method, perhaps signified by a local name (Tregear et al., 2007). Therefore, in order to explore the extent to which place

was used to sell food to tourists, I had to interview firms that had made a deliberate decision to promote themselves in this way.

A second reason for selecting such firms was that I needed to find out about the structures relating to people’s food choices. By talking to producers who had made a feature of their locality, I was able to understand more about how these structures were enabling or constraining them and how they were using their agency in response to these circumstances.

In order to select interviewees by the categories given in Tables 3 and 4, I complied a list of suitable candidates using the trade directories of regional food groups such as Made in Cumbria, Taste of the West and the Exmoor Producers’ Association. I also used stallholder listings from the food tents of local agricultural shows and looked through the archives of local newspapers for producers mentioned in local food-related stories. The businesses on this list all made a feature of their locality and therefore all were equally suitable candidates for interview. However, in order to get the broadest range of

responses possible, within each category I tried to select businesses that were as varied as possible in terms of the kind of products they produced and the size of their business. For example, in the meat and dairy category for the Lake District, my interviewees consisted of a small cheese producer whose products were sold mainly in Cumbria, and a large meat producer whose products were sold throughout the UK. I then followed the same strategy that I used with the café and restaurant owners: namely, an initial email followed by a telephone call if required. These interviews also took place during January,

February and March to ensure that I was contacting producers at a relatively quiet time of year. This time, refusal rates were slightly higher for the simple reason that businesses tended to be small in nature with a high volume of work being undertaken by a relatively small number of staff. Consequently, 9 of the 26 people contacted were too busy to take part. In cases where my first choice interviewee was unavailable, I would move on to the second person on my list, and so on.