Giovanni Manfroni This July, Feria de Productores is our featured member! The guest post below was written by Víctor Eduardo Flores Gutiérrez.
Feria de Productores is a project that was born in 2014 in the city of Guadalajara, the second largest in Mexico, in a context where the consumption of ultra-processed food has become a real public health problem.
Despite being one of the few countries considered to possess great biological and cultural diversity, expressed in a gastronomy considered World Heritage by UNESCO, Mexico today imports more than 50% of its food from abroad.
It is in this context that Feria de Productores was born as an initiative whose mission is to establish a communication bridge between small producers with sustainable production practices and people from the city of Guadalajara interested in consuming their products. To this day, Feria de Productores translates into a Sunday market with the participation of more than 60 productive projects and multiple families that visit it every week to do their shopping.
In addition to the Sunday market, Feria de Productores has a series of thematic fairs dedicated to agave, corn and cocoa, which seek to highlight the agronomic and gastronomic wealth of Mexico, through exhibitions, conferences, workshops, agrotourism and the participation of specialized producers.
Likewise, Feria de Productores has a program of activities that includes visits to the farms and ranches participating in the market, productive workshops and talks, among others.
Additionally, the market has established different partnerships with different NGO’s, universities and networks that have increased the reach of its activities. In this manner, Feria de Productores provides a space for a recycling point for the service of our community. We also collaborate with a community center that provides meals for children of low income families. Through this partnership, vendors can offer part of the produce that could not be sold during the market day and avoid food waste.
The market opens every Sunday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Club de Leones in the city of Guadalajara and has the participation of productive projects from municipalities near the metropolitan area such as Tlajomulco, Tonalá, Tlaquepaque, Zapotlanejo, and many more. Some of the products that can be found at Feria de Productores depending on the season are: corn derivatives, vegetables, tropical fruit (mango, coconut, pineapple, papaya, guava, lemon), tortilla, honey, coffee, chocolate and derivatives of cocoa, meat from regenerative livestock, cheeses and dairy products, free-range eggs, cleaning and personal care products, pulque and aguamiel (beverages derived from agave), among many more.
Photo Credit: Feria de Productores
