In recent years, there has been an upsurge of retail led initiatives aiming to improve production and consumption of food. These include both ‘active consumer engaging’ measures and portfolio management, i.e. ‘behind the scenes’ strategies, where retailers work to improve food supply chains through their sourcing policies International examples include Tesco’s decision to stop selling Brazilian beef in 2018 , and the German discounter Penny demonstrating the true costs of a selected number of food items. However, little is known about the extent to which these initiatives can stimulate large scale improved production practices in terms of lowered environmental impacts from primary production and food consumption, in Sweden and in other countries.

With project partners we aim to map out what retailers have done so far in terms of incentivizing production and consumption improvements through for instance sourcing strategies and portfolio management. We also aim to specifically assess effects of certification as this is a key mechanism used by retailers to ensure a certain environmental performance or production practices.

More specifically we will produce a database of past and current retail sustainability initiatives in Sweden and internationally by consulting scientific and grey literature. The focus is both on the supply and demand side, namely primary production, food processing and food consumption. We will include both initiatives that are openly communicated to the public and those where retailers work internally (hidden from consumers).

Initiatives will be evaluated from the perspective of their expected effectiveness in reducing negative environmental and social impacts and consumer attitudes. We also aim to test new retail led initiatives in grocery store environments.

Key research questions:

What are key sustainability initiatives from supermarkets and which dimensions do they cover?

What is their expected effectiveness regarding transforming the food system?

How are initiatives matching company sustainability targets?

What are consumer attitudes towards initiatives from the food retail sector?

Earlier work has demonstrated that a key barrier for small producers wanting to enter retail markets is too low prices and a perception of loss of brand identify. Supermarkets could play an important role in helping small and local producers who may not yet be certified by any third-party program to scale up their production. But what are mechanisms to help them enter retail markets and stay there, and how to assess their environmental performance without certification standards in place?

In WP2, an overview of existing supermarket programs and initiatives for small and local producers will be given, including lessons learned from existing cases of bringing small producers’ products into the retail environment. Secondly, barriers and enablers for successful implementation will be identified. We aim to learn from earlier initiatives and will use a multiple case study approach.

The rapid expansion of retailers’ own brands is a major trend for the Swedish and global food system. On one hand, the own brand strategy can offer producers stability, secure contracts and a marketing machinery run by retailers. Moreover, retailers can apply strict sourcing requirements to ensure a certain environmental performance. On the other hand, own brands can lead to less beneficial contracts for producers/suppliers and a loss of brand identity.

We aim to deliver in-depth knowledge on the effects of retailers’ own brands on the food production and supply chain. Procedures to facilitate collaboration between retailers and producers/suppliers so that they fuel innovation instead of the opposite will be explored.

Key research questions:

What are existing retail led initiatives to support small producers and what are barriers and enablers for successful implementation?

What is the role of logistics and distribution models and what could the role of food retailers be in improving the capabilities of small producers to move towards sustainability?

What is the role of retailer’s own brands for shifting to sustainability and what are social and environmental pros and cons?

We aim to work with project partners and supporting partners to co-create concrete business models and assess the outcome of these initiatives. We will use the insights from the project to create new models and value chain approaches aiming to create retail market opportunities for small and medium scale producers.

Through a series of workshops, we will:

Co-create new initiatives together with producers and/or food companies, retailer and other relevant actors.

Better understand challenges related to finance models, risk-sharing, logistics and marketing.

Ensure a sense of mutual trust between involved parties, knowledge sharing from large (retail) and small (producer/food companies) actors and fair deals for small producers.

Link the initiatives to the project’s goal of better understanding conditions enabling primary producers to shift to more plant based, sustainable blue food and eco-labelled foods.

Key research questions:

What are lessoned learned from co-created retail-led sustainability initiatives?

What is their potential for supporting a diverse and resource efficient Swedish farming landscape?

In WP4 we aim to capture different conceptualisations of levers and barriers towards food system transformation to sustainability (key actor mental models) and use these as a starting point for transformational dialogues.

Mental models are cognitive representations of complex systems. These are important as subjective understandings tends to determine how people respond to sustainability challenges. If people have conflicting ideas about a system and variables impacting it in a certain direction, it will be challenging to manage it and together steer it in a certain direction. Thus, identifying different actors’ perceptions of a system (Swedish food system) and what drives certain processes (e.g. scaling up sustainable food production) will help in the communication and coordination and ultimately facilitate the process of identifying transformation pathways.

The mental models of representation from Swedish food retail and large food companies will be gathered and analyzed and differences and similarities in models identified. The models will in the next step be used as a point of departure for retail dialogues aiming to reveal and unpack barriers and opportunities for increased collaboration to shift towards sustainable production and consumption.

Key research questions:

What are similarities and differences in mental models of barriers and levers for food system transformation among key corporate actors in the Swedish food system?

How can transformational dialogue in the food retail sector function as an engine for change?