Together with the Flemish Centre for Agro and Fisheries Marketing and under the guidance of OneInchWhale, a consumer insights & market research agency, a preparation process was launched in spring 2022 as part of this project. Several workshops examined how the "Say-Do gap" regarding the purchase of local food could be explored in an innovative way. This was broken down into 3 research questions:

• How can consumers be better guided towards local food at the point of sale? 
• What is needed to communicate quickly and clearly about local food? 
• How can purchasing behaviour towards local food be influenced?

Through a virtual market research design, VLAM wishes to answer these questions. VLAM aims to build a virtual shopping environment that resembles the reality of a shopping experience as closely as possible and to test scenarios concerning the "Say-Do gap" through exploratory market research.

A market consultation took place on 16 December to test the market research design against the market to find out to what extent companies can provide or develop solutions. The presentation of the market consultation and the final report of the preliminary process by OneInchWhale are available at documents below.