VALUE CHAIN COORDINATION COLUMN: Bridging margin and mission

Abstract

First paragraphs:

My  local grocery cooperative has an informal motto of “No Margin, No Mission.” This pithy expression, likely familiar to many JAFSCD readers and community development practitioners, is a catchy shorthand for the financial reality that business viability is a necessary prerequisite for ful­filling an organization’s social and/or environ­men­tal mission (Diamond & Barham, 2011). Working in local and regional food systems, I find this sim­ple mantra helpfully summarizes the dual-bottom-line challenge of supporting thriving, resili­ent regional food economies that can simultane­ously support farmers, their environment, and the communities they feed.

Value chains are food supply chains that link agricultural producers with markets, adding eco­nomic value throughout. As I have written in this column previously (Hall et al., 2026), value chains may also prioritize the core mission of farm viabil­ity, ecological sus­tainability, and access to healthy foods or other community benefits. Value chains are facilitated by relational infrastructure, provided by networks of coordinators that hold strategic partnerships and actively foster win-win relation­ships across partici­pants within the supply chain. Value chains strug­gle to perform, however, unless the businesses along the chain are fiscally func­tional and the rela­tional infrastructure connecting them is adequately resourced. The relationship runs both ways: coor­dination helps enable fair returns, and those returns in turn sustain the businesses and relationships that create further value. . . .