Due to increasing demand and request of consumers for regional products, many products advertise with the label "regional". Nevertheless, food in Europe travels an average of around 3500 kilometres before it is consumed. The regionalisation of value chains means reducing the number of stages from production to consumption and shortening the distances in between. This is usually not only more environmentally friendly due to the shorter transport routes, but also helps in the long term to establish regional value-added processes and cooperation between regional businesses.

In this podcast episode, Charlotte Thielmann from detektor.fm discusses how such cooperation can succeed with experts from the field of regional value chains: it deals with initiatives that promote regional networks and examples of such cooperation in Freiburg am Breisgau.

Jörgen Beckmann and his colleagues, together with the research network Agronauten, explore the question of how regional value chains can be strengthened. He explains that a large part of food is sold through supermarkets, which in turn distribute their goods through large logistics centres. As a result, products often travel a long way before they reach consumers.

In order to make these processes more sustainable, the producer association "Schwarzwald Bio-Weiderind" was founded in southern Germany in the early 1990s. The cooperation of the farms with regional supermarkets around Freiburg strengthens direct marketing and regionalises the value chains. This allows the cooperating producers to calculate a fixed price independent of the market, says farmer Markus Kaiser, whose farm Goldbachhof in Bernau is part of the cooperation.

Other guests in this episode are the founder of Freiburg Regionalwert AG, Christian Hiß, and the manager of the organic restaurant Adelhaus, Jonas Schmidt. They present the concept of the citizens' stock corporation Regionalwert AG: Shareholders can invest specifically in organic farms along the regional value chain and support farmers with the invested capital to operate sustainably.

The production is part of "Knowledge for Future – The Environment Podcast", which is a cooperation between detektor.fm and Ecologic Institute and regularly reports on good approaches to sustainable management.

You can find the episode "Vom Acker auf den Teller" on detektor.fm and on all popular streaming platforms (Spotify, Deezer, Apple Podcasts).