Exploring Social Media Data to Understand How Stakeholders Value Local Food: A Canadian Study Using Twitter

The consumption of local food, a major trend in industrialized countries around the world has experienced an unprecedented craze in the pandemic context that we are experiencing. Since the beginning of the crisis and in various media, communication about local food seems inconsistent. However, companies would have every interest in better communicating the multifaceted areas of the locality that customers value or adopting the same language if they wish to collaborate with each other. This research aims to identify and evaluate the “fit” or the “gap” of the different local food’ meanings of Canadian agri-food stakeholders through data mining of one of their communication media: Twitter. Using tweets by over 1300 Twitter accounts from Canadian agri-food companies and a popular hashtag, we analyze a sample of their tweets in 2019 and 2020 by creating and using a local food’ keyword dictionary based on the concept of proximity. Term frequency and multivariate analysis of variance of 16,585 tweets about local food show significant differences in dimensions of proximity used in communications. This study shows the interest of using the concept of proximity to better define and understand the valuation of local food products. In addition, it offers a methodology capable of distinguishing the nuances of meaning of the locality of products using natural data that is accessible via social media.