How Local and Seasonal is the Consumption of Soft Fruit in Scotland?

The main implication of the food miles indicator is that in order to protect the environment consumers should purchase food locally and seasonal. However, something that it is missing in all discussions is the evidence about how bad or good - in terms of locality and seasonality- is the actual consumption of food. This is probably due to the fact that food consumption statistics are available as aggregated annual data. In this paper we analyse the purchases of food, in particular the purchases of soft fruits in Scotland, which not only have marked production seasonality but also are imported from the rest of the UK and from abroad. For the analysis we use the Kantar Worldpanel dataset for the period 2006 until 2009. The results indicate that Scottish soft fruit covers a relatively small segment of the market and therefore eat locally would imply reduce significantly the consumption of soft fruit, even during the Scottish produce season. As regards the consumption seasonality, the purchases of soft fruit, particularly strawberry, seem to be seasonal despite the possibility of getting out-of- season imported soft fruit.