Estimating Your Total Food Market Size

The U.S. Food Market Estimator from the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University popped into my inbox today. It is a tool to estimate the gross consumption of food required in any state. For example, I found that in Washington State the population required the production of 18,326,421 pounds of garlic annual. Fascinating!

For small farmers, it puts our production capabilities into perspective. The market is huge, and we are small niche providers of specialty products. It can be easy to lose sight of this when we go into a huge grocery store and see as much produce a we may produce in a month or even a season on the shelves. It goes a long way to showing how there is room for us in the fresh food market.

This is a well-developed tool and the website provides supporting information, with links to the following topics:
• What is the U.S. Food Market Estimator?
• How does this tool work?
• Does this tool show actual consumption?
• What are the limitations of this tool?
• What food products are included?
• How are units of measure determined?
• Who might use this tool?
• Who developed the U.S. Food Market Estimator?

I encourage everyone to bookmark this tool and use it.