In 2023 the New England Feeding New England project set forth a goal reaching 30% regional food consumption from regionally produced food by 2030. How will we know if we have achieved this goal in 2030 and how much local or regional food is being consumed in 2025, half way through the decade?  

The Local Food Count project will be collecting 2025 local and regional food sales data from across the region from a variety of retailers (such as regional grocery store chains, food coops, and convenience stores), restaurants, institutions (such as hospitals, schools, and universities), and direct market sales (such as farmers markets, CSAs and farmstands).  

BE PART OF THE 2025 NEW ENGLAND LOCAL FOOD COUNT 

You can be part of the 2025 New England Local Food Count by providing our data collection team with your sales / procurement data through our confidential and secure web-portal. Your data will then be aggregated with everyone else who provides their data, ensuring that no individual identifying data is made public. Through data visualizations (like this) we will be able to show how much locally produced food is consumed in each New England state and by food category (e.g., dairy, meat, produce, grains, etc.). 

Having a mid-decade count of local food sales will help us all understand how much farther we have to go to achieve our 30% x 2030 goal and will hopefully inspire you to be part of our efforts over the next 5 years. 

The Local Food Count is part of New England Feeding New England, a program of the New England Food System Planners Partnership that uses a standard and proven methodology of data collection and analysis to account for local food purchased and sold within one calendar year. It serves as the mechanism by which we measure our progress toward the ambition New England Feeding New England goal: to grow, raise, catch and produce 30% of New England’s food from within New England by 2030. 

The Local Food Count methodology standardizes how local food gets counted at the point of wholesale within each New England state. The data is collected from a variety of official sources (e.g., US Census of Agriculture) and directly from food system entities (e.g., distributors, grocers, institutions). Data is also collected for major product categories (e.g., dairy, meat, produce) and by market channel (e.g., grocery/retail, restaurant, institutions, direct sales, etc.). 

The Local Food Count methodology was first developed in Vermont in 2011 with an inaugural count taking place across Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Maine in 2022. We released the results of the 2022 Local Food Count in the Fall of 2023.

The Partnership’s planning and strategic outreach process for the 2025 Local Food Count—which will take place in all six states and collect 2025 sales and purchasing data between January and April 2026—is currently underway.