Five Mile Food

People want to buy local food. It’s a £5.7bn market, growing at 7% per annum.
The reason it’s not growing faster is logistics: supermarket supply chains are based on large, centralised distribution facilities. They aren’t built to collect from many local producers and deliver within the same area. So supermarkets can’t meet demand.
Five Mile Food wants the market to grow faster. So we plan to build a logistics network for local food. It’ll be a new type of network: one built to deliver local food at a national scale. Developments in ecommerce and just-in-time order handling will help us innovate in the way we distribute local food.
The benefits are huge. A commercially viable company turning over £300-600m p.a. Hundreds of local jobs. Reduced wastage in the supply chain. Reduced greenhouse gas emissions.
To prove this is feasible, we need to build simulation models of the network. This will help us tune the network parameters and demonstrate viability to potential partners.