The goal of producing healthy food using agriculturally sustainable practices unites a diverse group of stakeholders – ranging from sustainable agriculture organizations, healthy food consumer groups, to public and private institutions.  The scope and rapid innovation in local/regional food systems has outpaced the ability of policy researchers to develop the data metrics for assessing its impacts.  That is, local/regional foods systems are nearing a ‘take-off’ stage such that efforts to quantify its impacts appear to be chasing a moving target.  Thus, lacking the ability to make a quantitative assessment, our paper develops the conceptual argument that the groundswell of activities across local, state, and national levels initiated by a dedicated array of producer groups, nonprofit organizations, private sector businesses, and the public sector are fundamentally reshaping how food is produced and consumed.  While food policy researchers have primarily focused on the consumer outcomes addressing at-risk populations or public health issues, one concept new to the public discourse but shared by local/regional food systems advocates is that developing local/regional marketing channels strengthens the economic viability of local farmers and their communities.  First, we suggest that these activities are leading to the emergence of ‘retail agriculture’ as a distinct sector separate from traditional commodity production.  Second, we argue that the current revolution in information technologies has been essential to scaling up this sector by (i) communicating these shared values across producer and consumer groups, and (ii) generating an economically viable market niche for entrepreneurial small and medium-size farmers by weakening the benefits of scale and scope economies in conventional agricultural and food sectors.  Third, we argue that public and private ‘social entrepreneurship’ ventures have been and continue to be key innovators in developing new marketing channels for farmers to sell directly to diverse household and institutional consumers.  Social entrepreneurship ventures use market mechanisms to achieve social goals, which allow for replicability and innovation over the lifetime of these enterprises.  In addition to direct-to-consumer outlets, these marketing channels include farm-to-school, farm-to-hospital, ecommerce aggregators, food hubs, and virtual markets.  Finally as a result, these new market channels allow farmers to capture more of the food dollar while at the same time they are developing local/regional infrastructures and mechanisms to meet the demand of larger institutional buyers.