Local Orbit supports 12,000 buyers and suppliers across North America who do business in 85 local markets. As our CTO Andy Bass has written, “Local Orbit generates millions of transactions on a daily basis, across all aspects of the order to cash process – from selecting suppliers, to managing products, to placing orders, tracking the delivery process, and so on. Each of these activities contains tiny pieces of information, that when taken together as a collection, add up to valuable insight to industry trends and customer habits.”
Understanding the data they create helps businesses make better decisions and, ultimately, transform and sustain local supply chains. We’ll be sharing high-level insights from our network on a regular basis to help people understand what’s happening in this growing space.
Top Revenue Drivers for Food Producers across the Local Orbit Network – May-July 2016
Whole animals – grass-fed cows, heritage breed hogs, and pastured chickens – were the top-selling items across the country in the past 90 days, driven by markets in the Northeastern US and Canada.
When you break down sales by region, they get more diverse. Strawberries, asparagus, and peaches drove the most revenue to farmers in the Western US and Canada. Pastured eggs, lettuce mixes, and artisan bread topped the list in the Midwest.
Understand the Story of Your Organization’s Data
If you’d like to dig deeper, we’ve just launched a custom dashboard and visualization service that enables food buyers, suppliers, and regional partners to measure what they’ve done, track where they’re going, and plan for the future. Dashboards can help you establish benchmarks; track progress toward local/sustainable procurement goals; forecast demand and sales; develop pricing strategies; analyze network capacity; assess impact; and more.
The data service works as either an add-on to Local Orbit’s sales and business management tools, or as a standalone dashboard to connect and visualize data from any source. Talk to Us About the Beta.
Map icons by Clockwise, Creative Stall, Yair Cohen, Franc, Jarem Frye and Christopher Scott from thenounproject.com