The local food business models seek to reverse the governance and price trends that traditional commodity production has fostered. To this end, it is not surprising that some commodity producers are using local food production as a means of diversifying marketing strategies and contributing social benefits to their communities (Izumi, Wright and Hamm, 2010; Bloom and Hinrichs, 2011). However, these instances of blending local and commodity oriented production are rare; a notable example is Sysco, the largest food distributor in the U.S., who established pilots to incorporate local products into their traditional distribution system in two regional projects (Cantrell, 2010).