Our region of study for the SALSA project is the province of Castellón.
In this region we found that the typology of Small Food Businesses (SFB) very much depends on the product or products they work with, but generally they can be differentiated according to their activity, whether they are packagers, processors, artisan
food makers or retailers. These activities are rarely carried out on-farm, even when the final destination is self-consumption, as in the case of olive oil.
Sorting and packaging is important for export crops such as citrus, one of the main products from the region with an important participation of small farmers. This activity at small scale is done by either farmers’ cooperatives or private companies,
and it is essential for this crop to access the market.
Processing and food product making is particularly important for those primary products that require some transformation for their final consumption, such as milling olives into olive oil, almond cracking, making nougat (“turrón”) from almonds, or animal
slaughtering and making meat products like sausages. In our study region, oil milling is dominated by farmers’ cooperatives, often at small to medium scale, and artisan foods are made by small businesses.
A particular case of food retailers are the independent butchers’, which are almost always small businesses, most of them make their own meat products (sausages, hams, etc.) and tend to keep close connections with their supplying farms, also independent.