A brief introduction

At an era where more and more ecological questions have risen, it seems that European countries, such as Switzerland, are trying to encourage the sale of their national products within their own territory and reduce the importation of alimentary goods. Indeed, one can easily notice that swiss supermarkets are promoting regional products, with labels such as “Aus der Region” in order to answer a growing request from customers to buy local products.
Migros aus der Region label Coop mini region label Suisse garantie label
However, are these few changes a simple superficial trend, or do we really import fewer goods? The research conducted for the lecture Applied Data Analysis at the EPFL intends to determine the origin of most products we consume within Switzerland and in general, to give an overview of the income of resources from other countries to Switzerland, taking into account information as the origin of the ingredients and the place of manufacture.
The research was conducted with the help of the database Open Food Facts, which provides origin information about products that are sold in different countries around the world.

Where do the products we consume come from?

As part of our study, it is interesting to first understand the general situation in terms of food importation of our country and our neighbors in Europe. Which countries are the most important manufacturers? As we will see later, the answers can have an important impact, as processed food is not always manufactured within the country it is sold, and the origin of some products has to be foreign, as not all vegetables and fruits can grow under our latitudes. However, as Switzerland is a small country and requires the resources from other countries in order to feed its population, it is non negligible to study the behaviour of our neighbors, before focusing on our country.

The following maps show the most important manufacturers for the products sold in Europe and Switzerland.


What kind of products are these countries import?

Now, we take a look at the categories which the products in our dataset belong to. There are about 12K categories for the products which are sold and manufactured inside the Europe. It is interesting to see which countries tend to manufacture which kind of products?

Some of the most abundant types of products in the dataset are plant-based products, dairy products, sugary snacks, meat, cereals and potatoes. For most of these categories, France, Italy, Germany and Switzerland are part of the top manufacturing countries. Germany and France by their part, are recognised as being part of the top global food processors, supported by a developed workforce, progress in food technology and marketing innovation.(link)

The following table demonstrate which countries are dominant in the importation of these five categories inside the Europe. This information is obtained from Open Food Fact dataset.


Diving in the dataset, in the case of Switzerland, is found that there is a strong presence of products from MIGROS and COOP, enterprises committed to the local production.(link)

Evolution of consuming more local in Switzerland

Unfortunately there is no data available about the date or amount of consumption in the open food fact dataset. So we used other datasets which were more official to investigate the evolution of consuming more local in Switzerland.

Also it should be considered that the data provided by open food fact dataset is generated by the help of public, so the presented results so far may not perfectly represent the reality.

The following bar charts compare the amount of consumption with the importation of products for five important categories.

Although these graphs does not show any trend in growth or decrease in importation, they represent for most products, we tend to consume more products that are produced by Switzerland rather than imported ones. However, categories such as fruits greatly depends on the importation from other countries. This is due to the fact that we consume fruits that cannot grow in Switzerland, due to the climate, and the the demand is bigger than what the country can offer.



Is there an evolution of importation of goods in time?

The swiss Federal Customs Administration (AFD), department of the swiss confederation, proposes free open data on the swiss import of varied products. Among others, the quantity of products from Food, Beverages and Tobacco imported every year since 1988 is available. We can see that there is a increase of imported foodstuffs throughout the years. In order to better understand this phenomenon, we determined a strong linear correlation between this increase and the growth of the swiss demography since 1988.

We also studied the different flows of monthly imports on a shorter period, from 2012 to 2018, and found that there is a tendency to import more products during spring season. This can be due to the fact that Switzerland is not capable of producing the total amount of food consumed in the country (only about 60%) and that spring corresponds to the time of the year when the country's stockpiles are on credit. After a long winter and with the arrival of new seasonal fruits that are not always or already available in Switzerland, spring seems to be the time of the year where foreign resources are most required.

According to AFD, As we can see from the graph bellow, Italy is our main importer, with an amount of 598,673,940 kg of foodstuffs imported in 2017. Italy is followed by France, Germany and Spain.

Imports data of the swiss Federal Customs Administration

So... are we consuming local?

In a general way, we can say that we do consume more local products than imported ones. Indeed, Switzerland still provides more food goods than it imports, with a mean of approximately 60%. However, we do not eat more local products every time of the year. It seems that during the course of spring, or at the end of the winter Switzerland lacks of indigenous products and needs to import more foreign products.
Overall, there is also a great tendency to import more and more foodstuffs, but this can be explained by the fact the swiss population is growing. This growth of demography means that there are more and more people to feed but the surface of arable land cannot increase consequently. Future challenges to be considered for the coutry would be to still be able to produce the majority of products its population consumes in incoming years. Yet, this important question of local resources also belongs to the bigger problematic of the availability of the earth's ressources, and the fact that we use more than what the planet can renew (this year, on 1st August 2018, we had consumed more than what the planet can provide in an entire year according to Global Foorprint Network), but it is not the focus of this report.

As a final word

Consuming more local is a difficult task, as it means to be aware of the real seasons for foods such as vegetables or fruits, and to restrict our consumption of some products to specific times of the year. Indeed, the consumption of fresh tomatoes, strawberries or apricots in the middle of the winter are bad habits and should not even be considered, as they just do not respect nature. These choices should be made for obvious ecological reasons, but other challenges are also at the core of this need to consume more locally. Indeed, the agricultural sector in Switzerland suffers from a decreasing employement rate since 1990, evolving from more than 250'000 employees in the country to a little more than 150'000 in 2016 ( statistics from Union suisse des Paysans, archives from 2016). The agricultural sector could be the first to benefit from a consumption of local products and such behavior, if generalized to a great amount of the population, could save small farmers and help the swiss economy.

As a conclusion to this observable trend, it is interesting to acknowledge that beyond the general visible tendency of promoting regional products in our supermarkets, the question risen by this study is in fact more important and significant that one might think. Indeed, in 2014, the SSN, the Société Suisse de Nutrition (the Swiss Society for Nutrition), created a programm called FOODprints, which encourage people to consume more locally. The group found out that 25% of our environmental nuisances are due to our bad eating habits which include, among other components, such as our too large consumption of meat, the fact that we tend to buy too many products that are not seasonal or that were imported by plane. Of course, Switzerland have to import products in order to feed its population, as the land resources are not sufficient for the entire country (as reported from SSN). But, by consuming products according to their season in our latitude, we can reduce the ecological impact, as they will require shorter journeys to be imported, and we can also increase our nutritional health, by beeing aware of what we eat and why. The question of the consumption of local products is thus linked to the complex issues of our health, that greatly depends on our environment, hence the ecological aspect, and on our bad alimentary habits, and to the importance of developing and promoting local workers, which is also related to an economic aspect.