La vendita diretta dei prodotti ortofrutticoli un?esperienza siciliana

La vendita diretta dei prodotti ortofrutticoli un?esperienza siciliana - Fruits and fresh vegetables direct selling: case from a Sicilian experience A specific producer?s organization based on cooperative governance system that operates in the Province of Catania, primarily in the citrus fruit sector, has promoted in the first part of nineties a network of retailer stores, located in the northeast of Italy and directly managed by the cooperative members. This network of agricultural 118 producers has subsequently involved an increasing number of cooperatives and points of sale, structuring a policy based on a supply of citrus fruit linked with others fresh vegetables. This phenomenon is still growing, taking advantage of several new laws (the "Orientation law", the reformed Commercial law, and the 2007 State Financial Budget law) that simplify administrative and fiscal regulation on selling procedures. This law innovation process has also created new rules to make retailing activity easy and favourable (especially from the fiscal point of view) to direct selling run by the agricultural entrepreneur. This research takes in to account the economic results of this particular retailing activity, through an exploratory investigation conducted during 2005 and 2006, which underlines the added-value, generated by this specific formula used as a marketing tool. Furthermore, through this study it is possible to put in evidence, from the strategic point of view, some relevant characteristic constitutional elements and strengths or weaknesses system of this Sicilian producer?s organization model. The study results show the importance of an innovative organizational and managerial model for local agriculture, and how it is possible to compete in the market and guarantee sale flows and a interesting added-value level for the producers. The evidence of the study, concerning this specific network formula, introduces two different advantages. The first one is to protect agriculture and to guarantee the sale of the annual production, when there is a large volume of production. The second one is connected to the possibility of regulating sale flows and price level thanks to the extremely elastic structure of sales points, characterised by low investments and low fixed costs. Moreover, goods supply on command at sale points, enable a "just in time" shipment, optimizing logistics and goods collection in the company. The determination of the Unit Gross income obtained by the company production direct selling, has put in evidence the great amount of operative margins of the examined distributional channel. It has to be remarked that these margins can even increase if the company production gets integrated with associated organisations that are controlling complementary goods production. In other words, the recent law which encourages these integrations enable producers to increase their gains JEL Code: Q13 Key words: direct selling, citrus, organization, supply, value-added