The modern-day grocery infrastructure works through what you could call the wholesale retailer system. The crops themselves, such as different types of grains (like rice, millet, oats, quinoa, and others), vegetables (with some common examples being eggplant, beans, cabbages, and others) and other kinds of produce being grown by independent farmers, the smallest unit in the system. Usually after this, the produce is sold by farmers to wholesale retailers in nearby towns, who buy produce and manufactured goods at low rates and sell them to stores, grocery store chains, and others at discount rates, making this system clearly favored towards the middleman: wholesale retailers make massive earnings with every batch of products or manufactured goods sold.
Recently, there has been a trend of many different types of Chain Grocery stores and Supermarkets switching their suppliers, as wholesale retailers across the country as being passed over in favor of dealing directly with the farmers, a local Grower’s Corporation, or a local manufacturer of manufactured goods: Supermarkets and Chain stores are in the process of cutting the middleman out and dealing with the farmers themselves. This simple change is going to have a lot of long-lasting changes in the agriculture industry, with a whole lot of benefits for both the farmers and larger grocery stores.
More Income for Farmers
More income for the farmers themselves is one of the more obvious effects of cutting out the middleman, as the absence of the wholesaler means that they get to sell their produce (or manufactured goods, in the case of local companies) at increased prices, allowing the farmers to have a suitable level of income from selling their produce directly to supermarkets, stores, and Grocery chain stores. The increased income isn’t just more spending money, but actively contributes a lot towards improving the lifestyle of farmers in India, as cutting out the middleman (the wholesaler) would increase the income of the farmers by almost half! Stores and Grocery chains that decide to buy their produce directly from farmers and local companies help improve their lifestyle of the farmer, naturally pointing to a further increased quality of the crop.
Accelerated Market Access and The Need for Cutting Out the Middleman