The Short Supply Chain Cluster has established its first Cluster in North East Wales with community shops, farm shops and others stocking locally produced goods. They now work together to optimise resources and share expertise.
This was the first Cluster, established in North East Wales and focussed on linking Community shops and farm shops with local growers and producers. The first meeting of this Cluster offered opportunities for stocking local produce, immediately making a positive impact on reducing farm to fork miles.
The second regional Cluster was established in Mid West Wales with similar outcomes and a third Cluster is scheduled for a November launch in Mid East Wales.
These Clusters are quite organic and have developed individually to benefit all local food production, not just horticulturalists. Members have collaborated and established links which are suitable for their own scale of production, large or small, the type of retail outlets in the region and to make best use of the expertise available within each Cluster region and we are confident that this will continue.
Moving forward, we would anticipate that there will be greater collaboration between the Clusters in the 201 group to develop short supply chains and we feel that perhaps it would benefit the industry to have small regional meetings for this to move forward. A great example of this was held over the summer by the Welsh Government at Hawarden.