**4.3. Design and procedure**

To address the abovementioned objectives, a mixed design has been used to assess the added values of the production and distribution systems in Canada. The supply side situation was assessed by conducting personal in-depth interviews with alternative food producers and market intermediaries. 60 in-depth interviews were conducted in Ontario and Quebec, Canada, in Fall 2013 and Winter 2014. These interviews were based on an interview guide that lasted about 30 to 45 minutes. The guide probes respondents in the local food products value delivery network to discuss the actual structure of their distribution channel and their marketing approach. The interview guide is composed of three sections. The first section deals with the marketing approach used by producers/distributors, the second section aims to explore the structure of the channel of distribution, and the last section deals with how producers/distributors perceive the market structure. This three-prong data collection scheme helps to determine with minimal bias the characteristics of this new market from a supply side perspective. Distributors were approached according to (i) market size, (ii) local food catego‐ ries produced/sold, and (iii) by channel position (producers versus distributor). The in-depth interviews were recorded, transcribed, coded, and analyzed using content analysis (cf. [13]. This technique allows to process large amounts of textual information, systematically identifies its properties, and determines the frequencies of most used keywords.

On the other hand, to explore the local food products consumption patterns, a large-scale survey was administered to 1752 consumers. The population targeted for this study is alternative food shoppers. These consumers had to buy local food products and were ran‐ domly surveyed at small producers' farms gate, community farmers, farmers' market, community groceries, specialty stores, and community chain stores. The following food categories were targeted: fruits, vegetables, dairy, and meat. To this end and to test the 2nd objective, a structured questionnaire was designed. This objective here is twofold: (i) to determine the impact of consumer concerns and motivations on local food product purchase, and (ii) to study product attributes preferences and more generally the consumption patterns of local food consumers. The survey was developed by selecting other case study question‐ naires on the topic of locally grown products [9, 20]. Section 1 of the survey deals with consumers concerns over local food products in general, and assesses their consumption, preferences and purchasing patterns. These questions determine purchasing frequency, typical shopping habits, spending, product attributes, and concerns over local food products. Section 2 of the survey deals with consumers perceptions and willingness to buy locally produced food. The last section of the survey is used to determine the socio-demographic profiles of the respondents including variables such as gender, occupation, age, number of people in the household, education, income and postal code. Prior to administering the survey, a pre-test was done and minor modifications were made. Quantitative data for this study was analyzed using SPSS statistical package. Data was cleaned and missing values were replaced using the mean. Out of the 1752 collected surveys, 1611 questionnaires were usable. A combination of reliability tests and factor analyses were performed to determine the reliability and the structure of the data.
