SUSFOOD2: Sustainable Food Platforms: Enabling sustainable food practices through socio-technical innovation

With more consumers having access to an internet connection and with the introduction of reliable electronic payment options, online food provisioning has increased in Europe. Eurostat data shows that in 2009, 5 per cent of consumers had bought food online during the past 12 months, in 2018, 15 per cent reported the same In food retail, digitalisation is now enabling new platforms for food provisioning that are promoting novel and more sustainable ways of not only provisioning but also storing, preparing, and cooking food. As mentioned below, we saw an increased use of online shopping during the pandemic. This project has explored under what conditions online platforms for food provisioning, meal box schemes and online grocery shopping, could change food consumption practices and whether these changes may contribute to more sustainable food consumption. We conclude that online food provisioning has the potential to change household food consumption in a more sustainable direction, but that in their current form ? they are not fulfilling this potential in any significant way. Based on our findings, we make the following overall recommendations for businesses and policymakers wanting to contribute to achieve the sustainability potential of digital food services: Co-design to align scripts with needs: The intended use of a digital technology for food provisioning does not necessarily correlate with how it is used by consumers at home, who are in many cases and for several reasons, circumventing the intended script. Consumers are far from passive agents; they operate and adjust digital technologies according to their social world. Hence, future innovations should be co-designed with consumers to align scripts more closely with their needs. Focus on convenience: Sustainability may not be a concern for the users of these services; however, more sustainable consumption patterns can be achieved through the desire for convenient and efficient grocery shopping and providing a proper meal for the family. Food services should thus develop new scripts, which make it convenient to engage in sustainable food practices. Such scripts could for instance be related to navigation, shopping lists, delivery frequencies, and labelling. Acknowledge the interrelatedness of consumer practices and focus on context: It is important not to focus on single practices (i.e., acquisition) but to include the entire context in which they exist (everyday life) when developing services and policy measures to reduce the environmental impact of food consumption. Scaling up online grocery stores is the lowest hanging fruit: We argue that in a short-term perspective there is greater potential in upscaling online food services that mimic some of the practices of the offline version of them than there is for services requiring more substantial changes within established food practices. The above recommendations also serve as input to future research endeavours. Future research should further explore how the scripts embedded within digital food services can be developed to efficiently contribute to more sustainable food consumption. The food provisioning services in our study market themselves as sustainable alternatives with the potential to reduce transport emissions, reduce food waste through better portioning and planning, increased use of organic products and vegetarian meals, and information about sustainable choices on their websites and apps. What can be taken from the considerations of barriers and opportunities, is that although both box scheme and online grocery store services can be seen to provide both infrastructure and technology that could, in theory, influence food practices to become more sustainable - this potential is currently not unleashed. However, by seizing the listed opportunities, we could move closer to the realization of such a potential. In WP3, we explored consumers' food practices, purchase behavior, the effect of the covid-19 pandemic on the platforms' customer base, and preferences for the business model of online food platform. We conduct surveys in cooperation with online food platforms in Italy and Germany and with representative sample in Ireland and Norway. We find that the covid-19 pandemic has extended but not significantly changed the customer base of many online food platforms. We find few differences in food practices and purchases behavior between early adopters and the new covid-19 customers of online food platforms. Most of the customers expect to continue using online food platforms at a similar level after the pandemic. Using a choice experiment, we find that convenience and product origin are essential for segmentation. A large segment prioritizes local, seasonal, and high-quality products, which is the core of many of the platforms we have studied. However, if the platforms want to reach out to most people, easy ordering and home delivery will be critical success factors.

Vårt prosjekt har frambrakt kunnskap av stor interesse for tre målgrupper. I matvaresektoren har målgruppen vær plattformeiere og dagligvarekjeder som selger over nett. Fordi matvareforbruket er sterkt vevet inn i hverdagslivets praksiser, må utformingen av tilbudet tilpasses dette. En annen målgruppe er offentlige myndigheter. Budskapet er at bærekraft er et mangfoldig begrep, og som fortolkes og forstås på ulike måter i husholdningene. Dette er noe som det politiske budskapet knyttet til forbrukernes rolle i overgangen til mer bærekraftige løsninger må ta hensyn til. Akademia er en tredje målgruppe. PLATEFORMS har lykkes i å skape et forskningsbasert nettverk. Som følge av prosjektet samarbeider Norge og Sverige (Universitet i Gøteborg) om søknader på nordisk nivå ? vi planlegger også sampublikasjoner i forlengelse av prosjektet. Norge (SIFO) og Italia (University of Trento) er i samtaler om et institusjonelt samarbeid knyttet til utveksling av studenter på masternivå.

In recent years, we have seen an increase in the range of food provisioning platforms available to consumers. Each platform presents consumers with a unique choice architecture. These emerge from both e-commerce development and consumer-driven food provisioning. Little is known about the impact of these new platforms on food choices, or to what degree they represent new opportunities to promote sustainable food practices. PLATEFORMS aims to produce in-depth knowledge on how food practices are affected by socio-technical innovations in food provisioning platforms, and communicate success stories of sustainability to platform owners and policy makers. The project includes both business-driven platforms (e.g supermarkets, online stores) and consumer-driven platforms (e.g food cooperatives). Methodologically and theoretically, the project is positioned between individualistic and systemic approaches – wheras the first is focusing on changing individual consumer behavior, and the second is ignoring consumers in favor of other actors and more “macro” solutions. More specifically, this project takes a socio-technical practice approach, seeing consumption in all its phases of planning, provisioning, storing, cooking, eating, and disposing – driven by practices more than by individual choices. The project will promote sustainable food choices through involvement with platform owners, dissemination of academic results and communication of sustainable success stories across countries and platforms. The communication will target platforms owners, policy makers, and NGOs. By producing new in-depth knowledge about concrete strategies to enable sustainable food consumption through food provisioning platforms, the project will affect consumer practices and choices on a larger scale. Moreover, through intervention studies and collaboration with platform owners, it will be possible to quantify the effect of interventions.