How to co-create local food products and services with consumers?

Local food supports local finance, employment, and cultural traditions. Local food producers often have limited resources to invest in R&D and their risk-taking ability is low. Earlier studies indicate that utilising the user's creativity and innovation capability has a lot of potential for new product development and service design. For local food producers social media offers cost-efficient possibilities for involving customers into the product and service development. The aim of the study is to find out how to co-create local food products with consumers. The study is dyadic taking both consumers' and producer's perspectives. The results indicate that consumers are interested in having long-term relationships with producers. They are motivated to participate into the development process because of the possibility to gain better products, possibility to learn and gain new insights. Producers are already using social media, and next logical step would be utilising social media in co-creation process.