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For decades, grocery retailers have struggled to efficiently source, purchase, and manage local food at scale. While consumer demand for local products has surged, with shoppers increasingly prioritizing freshness, transparency, and support for their regional food systems, most grocery stores remain saddled with legacy systems that were never designed to handle the fragmented, high-touch nature of local supply chains.
The core challenge is operational: grocers are built to buy from a handful of national distributors, not hundreds of individual farms. Legacy ERP, EDI, and procurement systems are optimized for centralized vendors offering standardized SKUs, fixed pricing, and predictable fulfillment windows. In contrast, local producers offer seasonal products with variable availability, prices, pack sizes, and delivery schedules. Managing these relationships manually via email, spreadsheets, PDFs, and phone calls is slow, error-prone, and impossible to scale efficiently across a multi-store footprint.
The result is an expensive and inconsistent local program that fails to meet its potential. Grocers either limit their local offerings to a narrow set of vendors or rely on third-party aggregators, sacrificing margins and traceability in the process. Store-level buyers are burdened with administrative overhead, from chasing invoices to reconciling deliveries, while corporate teams lack visibility into what’s being purchased and from whom. Farmers, in turn, are frustrated by unclear demand signals and delayed payments—making the grocery channel unattractive compared to farmers markets, CSAs, or restaurants.
This isn’t a fringe issue. Local food is a multi-billion dollar market and growing. In the U.S. alone, USDA data shows that over $20 billion worth of local food is sold annually, with retail outlets representing a large and underdeveloped share. Over 70% of consumers say they prefer to buy local when given the choice, but most grocers only scratch the surface of what’s possible. Without the right tools, scaling a local program is simply too costly and chaotic to justify.
The problem Local Line addresses is both operationally complex and strategically vital. According to the Food Industry Association (FMI), nearly 90% of grocery executives believe local sourcing is critical to their long-term strategy, yet less than a third feel they have the infrastructure in place to support it. This gap represents a massive, industry-wide failure—and an enormous opportunity.
Consider a typical regional grocery chain with 50–200 locations. These companies often work with hundreds of local producers across their footprint, each with unique products, certifications, and distribution capabilities. Without automation, every local order represents a manual transaction - orders entered by hand, emails confirming deliveries, invoices uploaded individually, and payments managed separately from centralized accounts payable systems. Multiplied across stores, weeks, and vendors, the inefficiencies become staggering.
Grocers also face growing regulatory and consumer pressure to increase transparency in their supply chains. They’re being asked to report on sustainability, food miles, and farm-level growing practices, but their systems weren’t built to track these data points. Store teams lack tools to differentiate local products from conventional ones, and corporate teams lack the reporting infrastructure to communicate their impact to customers or stakeholders.
Meanwhile, labor shortages across the grocery industry have pushed many retailers to rethink how they deploy staff. Asking in-store buyers or procurement teams to manually coordinate dozens of small farm relationships is not just inefficient—it’s a poor use of resources in a margin-constrained industry.
What’s more, existing procurement software is ill-suited to the problem. Most ERPs, POS systems, and EDI platforms treat local farms as exceptions, not primary vendors. They lack the flexibility to manage variable pack sizes, rolling availability, custom delivery zones, or direct-to-store logistics. As a result, grocers are left cobbling together homegrown spreadsheets, customer service hacks, and bolt-on tools that don’t scale and create internal chaos.
Put simply, the pain is real and growing. Local food is no longer a niche—it's an expectation. But grocers can’t meet that expectation without a purpose-built solution.
Local Line is the only end-to-end local sourcing platform designed specifically for grocers and their local suppliers. We provide a unified system that streamlines the entire process of buying from local farms - from sourcing and ordering to fulfillment, invoicing, and payments, while delivering the data visibility and controls grocery teams need to scale confidently.
Here’s what sets Local Line apart:
Unlike general procurement systems, Local Line was built from the ground up for the unique dynamics of local food. Our platform supports variable availability, custom pack sizes, fluctuating prices, and flexible delivery schedules - all the things that make local food operationally complex, but valuable. We treat local suppliers as primary vendors, not exceptions to the system.
Local Line is the only solution that provides tools for both grocers and farmers. On the grocer side, we enable centralized and store-level buyers to easily browse, compare, and order from hundreds of local suppliers. On the farm side, we offer vendors a branded portal to manage inventory, accept orders, create packing slips, and send invoices—all in one place. This two-sided infrastructure reduces friction on both ends and improves adoption.
We’re not just a software company - we’re deeply embedded in the local food ecosystem. Local Line has built a network of over 10,000 local farms across the U.S. and Canada and has spent the past eight years supporting them as primary users of our tools. That foundation allows us to quickly onboard new farms for any grocer, in any region. In many cases, we already have relationships with a grocer’s suppliers before the first store even launches.
Local Line is already working with multi-hundred store grocery chains across the U.S. and Canada. In 2025 alone, we’ve onboarded hundreds of new stores and have helped onboard thousands of products from regional farms. Our enterprise infrastructure supports centralized procurement, store-level autonomy, financial reconciliation, and traceability reporting at scale, requirements that general farm marketplaces and startups cannot meet.
Grocers using Local Line report 3–5x increases in local SKU count, 50–70% reductions in time spent managing farm relationships, and full payment automation across hundreds of vendors. Our reporting tools allow retailers to track local purchases by region, product, and farm, enabling them to showcase impact and support ESG reporting. And because our platform integrates seamlessly with existing store operations, we help reduce friction rather than add another layer of complexity.
The local food supply chain is broken, but not because of a lack of demand or supply. It’s broken because the infrastructure required to manage it hasn’t existed until now. Local Line provides grocers with a purpose-built solution that transforms the chaos of local sourcing into a scalable, efficient, and transparent program that strengthens community food systems and drives retail growth.
As consumer expectations evolve, retailers that embrace local will win. And Local Line is the platform that makes it possible.
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