Thunder Bay Food Strategy surveying people about local food

The Thunder Bay Food Strategy is surveying people about their desire for locally-grown food, as part of a largereffort to grow the local food economy.

The questionnaire asks residents how much factors like quality, price and sustainability figure into their food-purchasing decisions and whether they would pay more for food grown locally.

"We want to know what people want to see. What do they want to purchase? And do they want to buy local food, and if they do what's making it easy for them. And if they do but they're not ... what are those barriers," Food Strategy coordinator Amy Bumbacco told CBC.

• Local food strategy study begins phase one

Currently, there's lots of anecdotal evidence about the demand for local food in Thunder Bay, but there's no hard data to verify it, Bumbacco said, and that gets in the way of growing the local food scene.

"We don't really have those hard numbers that farmers could bring to the bank andask for a loan based on," Bumbacco said.

"So we're really trying to put in that work and get those numbers so that people can better evaluate business proposals, they can better expand their businesses, because they really understand what's out there."

The survey is part of the larger Thunder Bay and Area Food and Agriculture Market Study, which was a priority project of the 2015 implementation plan for the Thunder Bay Food Strategy.

You can answer the survey online.

There is a link on the Thunder Bay Food Strategy's website.