The purpose of this paper is to study the place of detachment processes in market agencing. The authors draw on the case of short food supply chains, especially those established to provide local produce to mass catering. They characterise short food supply chains as “market innovations through withdrawal”, i.e. market innovations aiming at detaching farmers and consumers from the middlemen of mainstream markets and reducing the number of food miles. They argue that detachment from mainstream market mediators generally calls for the creation of new mediators and highlight the difficulties of this agencing work. In line with the research on path dependence and lock-ins, they also show that existing attachments are binding and may impede detachments. Finally, the authors show that short food supply chains combine the establishment of new and pre-existing attachments and of new and pre-existing detachments. They sum up this combination of processes with the term “quasi-detachment”.