Locavore is a strong trend in food distribution. Consumers who buy local products to eat local have conducted these products at a 7 billion dollars sales in the United States, an annual sales growth rate of 13.4 % from 2008 to 2011 (Low and Vogel, 2011). As supermarkets do not have in stock a large variety of local products, consumers have to look for alternatives source of supply. On-Line solidarity Markets are new ways to answers this problematic.
On-Line solidarity markets are cooperatives that bring together local producers and consumers to provide a wide range of local products. These last ones can command items via a web site from Friday to Tuesday at each week. Thursday, they have to pass to a pick up place. Volunteers assemble the grocery list in a convivial ambiance. Customers pay the provisions and take the stock home. What are the reasons why consumers assume the numerous disadvantages of this way of doing things: limited time to command, delay between needs of ingredients and to take delivery of the goods, planning meals for many days, etc. To find out, we conducted an exploratory research among customers to know their motivations to deal with these cooperatives stores. We held three focus groups, one with regular members, another one with casual members and a last one with very episodic buyers.
Even if we had a small number of participants, it clearly appears that sociodemographic variables do not explain the buying behavior. Instead, psychographics variables have been identified. We have grouped them into four main values: 1) responsibility towards the area, 2) mode of production respectful and responsible, 3) eat healthily and 4) gastronomic pleasures. These values are in conjunction with sources of motivations identified by Bourgault (2007) to explain this behaviour: feeling to belonging to a territorial group, solidarity to this group, beliefs about the products and attitudes toward the place of production. These variables have been measured as explaining the choice of local products in store.
***