I've looked into this a bit and it seems to be a problem of distributors. Essentially there are very few distributors in North America. In some cases there is

I've looked into this a bit and it seems to be a problem of distributors. Essentially there are very few distributors in North America. In some cases there is only one distributor. If you need volume, you must buy from those distributors. The retail price for unprocessed vegetables is somewhere around 4 or 5 times the price paid to the farmer. The big exception is milk where in most countries there are laws on the retail price. Milk is about twice the farm price. This gives you an understanding of how much the distributors are shaving off. If you are running a small shop and you have connections to non-traditional distributors, you can probably cut the price in half. Which is what the article is claiming. But they will never be able to scale it because they just don't have access to most of the food.