Food MarketsFeeding Zurich from the Millennials' Perspective: Let’s Democratise Food Networks!Rémi Jourdan, Andres Ruiz Andrade, and Yannick Wettstein

Zurich’s food market landscape is strongly defined by the presence of few big players which are occupying locations all around the city and dominating the food distribution. They have the tendency to steadily grow and open new shops at strategic locations, easily accessible by various means of transportation for the many. As a result most small grocery shops have already disappeared, as they have not been able to remain competitive.

To diversify the offer means finding exotic newcomers for the domestic market and setting new food trends. One of the supermarkets’ favourite picture book story is the story about the avocado. Although it might change from another perspective.

Supermarkets are attractive to the majority of consumers due to the diversity and prices they offer. This is only possible as free trade treaties between the consumer and producer countries exist. The quality range of products varies significantly. On the one hand, products labeled Bio or Demeter need to follow strict regulations during the cultivation period which ensures good soil and food quality. On the other hand, cheap product lines almost do not have any restrictions. Food is treated with innumerable chemicals during the cultivation, transportation, and ripening process without caring about the soil nor the food quality.
Most city residents find shopping in supermarkets attractive as almost no planning is needed. Flexible shopping is important for consumers in a daily life routine, ruled by regular working hours.

As counter-reaction to the big retailers, many initiatives have raised. They are proposing different solutions for specific aspects of the predominant food market which, is only profit oriented and does not take into account ecological damage and health.
Today they have a marginal impact but find evermore resonance in a society which is interested to do something good for the planet. The small initiatives claim to be scaled up by replication of their models to reach a more important share in the food market which is controlled by few global retailers. They are not afraid of collaborating with these monopolists and are rather interested to have an impact on their mode of operation.

For the last decades, big supermarkets have dominated and set the conditions on how food is produced, processed, distributed, and sold. These supermarkets offer apparent advantages for the consumer, which many people who grew up within this logic of consumption could not even imagine to prescind from, such as low prices, big diversity and availability of products, and the comfort achieved by this. However the behaviour of these supermarkets have also created huge problems, mainly environmental and social. Today, we see that people are not only hungry for something to eat, but also hungry for alternatives that can actually enable the world to feed and nurture itself.