Food waste transitions: the role of retailers and other collective actors

Daniel Welch, Joanne Swaffield and David Evans

Research project: Households, Retailers and Food Waste Transitions

Funded by ESRC and the Sustainable Consumption Institute. Jan 2014-March 2015

Key informant interviews: how practitioners (retail, consultants, policy and third sector) frame, interpret and respond to the challenges posed by food waste. Attendance at stakeholder events.

Content analysis: secondary data analysis (grey literature, CSR, consumer-facing and NGO communications) in order to trace the emergence of food waste as an important challenge and one that households and retailers must respond to.

Survey analysis on eating habits and food waste: existing survey data from a panel of c.70,000 Tesco customer online panel; existing ‘food diary’ survey completed by c.1500 members of panel.

Knowledge exchange: Stakeholder workshop and dissemination event

Food Waste: A Current Issue

“Consumers in industrialised countries waste almost as much food as the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa.” Counting the Cost of Food Waste, House of Lords EU Subcommittee B, 2014

UK households throw away £60 of edible food a month. Eliminating avoidable food waste in the UK (4.2 m tonnes) would be the equivalent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of taking 1 in 4 cars off the road. New Estimates for Household Food and Drink Waste in the UK, WRAP, 2012

“30–50% (or 1.2–2 billion tonnes) of all food produced never reaches a human stomach.” Global Food: Waste Not Want Not, Institute of Mechanical Engineers, 2013

The Retailer–Household InterfaceThe household identified as a ‘hot spot’ of food waste by retailers

Retailer interventions in consumers’ provisioning and cooking practices to reduce food waste

In store: packaging, labelling (date labelling, storage, portion size), addressing incentives (e.g. BOGOFs), portion sized and mixed fresh products

In the household: storage, recipes (portion control, leftover recipes, online ingredient finder, online weekly meal planner)

Technical innovation: Food Rescue voice recognition app; Love Food Hate Waste app.

Behaviour change innovation: Defra funded project on habitual behaviour change with retail customers (Implementation Intention Plans). Scalability?

Problem Framing of Food Waste: The Responsibilised Consumer?

Sociological accounts of sustainable consumption note the dominance of the ‘responsibilisation of the consumer’, e.g.: ethical consumption (Barnett et al, 2011); sustainable practices, e.g., transport (Barr and Prillwitz, 2014); organic food (Lockie, 2002)

‘The consumer’ as a subject position accorded both rights and responsibilities in discourses of sustainable consumption.

‘Citizen-consumers’—individuals who exercise consumer choice through the lens of the moral, ethical, or ecological responsibilities expected of them as citizens.

Role of expertise of multiple intermediaries instantiating the responsibilised consumer through ‘technologies of the self’ (Foucault)

Focus on individual behaviour in sustainability policy; ‘correct’ choices of ‘citizen-consumers’; e.g., Defra Framework for Sustainable Lifestyles (2011)

Responsibilisation enacted by multiple collective actors in relation to food waste, e.g. international institutions (the FAO), formal political institutions (the European Commission), NGOs (WRAP, WWF) , ‘experts’ (Tristram Stuart, celebrity chefs), media, and retailers (Evans, 2014).

BUT we do not find the responsibilisation of the consumer dominant in food waste discourse.

Food waste generally does not exhibit agonistic relations between collective actors; rather there is co-production of the issue and normative isomorphism among retailers (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983).

‘I don’t think it was pressure, I think it was identified, partly through [our] carbon work but also partly what was going on more widely, discussions at the UN, discussions in the [European] Commission. It was identified as an issue, which key stakeholders cared about…So it wasn’t pressure as such…it was a realisation that it was an issue.’ (Retailer 2)

‘Lots of other organisations, UN FAO, UNEP… came to the same point at roughly the same time. I think that also created a sort of critical mass which stimulated a chatter in the media which I think people became aware of…’ (NGO 3)

‘I’m not sure there is a clear lead actually…it’s too big an issue for any one particular group…it has to be a collaborative piece ... I think all of the stakeholders – the NGOs, government, you know, individual government members, parliamentarians, other businesses – all of us are talking about the issue.’ (Retailer 3)

Caveats…[SCI] ‘Are retailers receptive?’‘They are, absolutely, over the years. It used to be that we were treated as pariahs on the outside kind of banging our fists and now what we’ll tend to find is that we’ll do a big project or campaign and then talk to them, put the pressure on that then they come to us and say well what do we have to do?’ (NGO 2)

‘…most recently the headlines have been, not dominated exactly… well I think the agenda has been set more than we would have liked, by the businesses themselves….I think they’ve managed to set the agenda a bit in their favour.’ (NGO 2)

Co-Production of Problem Framing

Normative consensus (austerity, food security, climate change): ‘food waste is morally repugnant’ (Policy 3)

‘…actually through discussions it quickly became apparent that our colleagues care about the issue. I mean even discussions that our suppliers cared about the issue. And our customers, through our own research, clearly care about the issue.’ (Retailer 2)

Stage of issue lifecycle: re food waste specifically, problem solving not awareness raising; re waste in general maturity of households’ relation to recycling and waste.

‘…austerity…happened to come along at the same time when households were becoming relatively mature in their understanding of the waste issue because of recycling …I think households are in the right place at the right time to start thinking about it. So that culture was so ingrained that waste was in here and ready; we just hadn’t thought about food.” (NGO 3)

Lack of counter-constituency ‘I think food waste is often quite a depoliticised issue, so I think actually whereas the things like GM and GM versus seed sovereignty…they were quite clearly delineated camps that are all battling it out for different sections. I feel like with food waste there is that but it’s a bit less explicit and a bit less formulated.’ (NGO 2)

Specificity of food: materiality; in terms of sustainability contrast energy related behaviours ‘I think…there’s something really fundamental about food that goes right to the human soul so it’s the basic building block of our species. I think if we’re talking about food I think people have an interest at a fundamental level.’ (NGO 3)

Enabling conditions of the food waste ‘discourse coalition’ (Hajer, 1993)

Food Waste as Distributed Responsibility‘I think we have to accept that we all have some responsibility in terms of reducing food waste; everyone does and it’s whether you can get people to accept their part of the responsibility for that process and be able to work collaboratively, so that there’s a joined up approach because clearly where there are problems is when there’s a break between one part of the food chain and another’ (Retailer 3)

‘I think we would definitely see it as a system-wide issue…if there is a focus for our interest, it’s more around what’s the interaction between those different stages in the system. So…there’s obviously consumer behaviours in terms of what do they actually do in the home with the food…but in terms of consumer buying habits, what influence does that have on the behaviours of the supermarkets? And equally supermarkets as a system of provision, what influence does that have on agricultural practices and all of that?’ (Policy maker 1)

‘So we feel we have a shared responsibility. When you look at what are the causes of waste on farms, some of the things, it will be very little to do with [our] operations; it’ll be things that are going on, on farm. But in other cases it can be down to, for example, forecasting ordering. Now, that is clearly a shared responsibility, it’s things that may be going wrong at the suppliers’ end and things that may be going wrong at our end…’ (Retailer 2)

‘I think there is a risk at times of retailers potentially doing things which don’t support customers to waste less…So I think taking the whole value chain perspective of the issue is very, very important, I think, to ensure that we’re not passing the waste problem down the value chain. So I think that’s where the shared responsibility comes in.’ (Retailer 2)

Retailer ASustainability Managerproject manages

Customer behaviour change programme on food waste

Consultancy 1Develops and runs programme

through Retailer A’s consumer panel

Evidence review 1 published jointly with Defra, Consultancy 1, Consultancy 2

DefraFunds programme as part of sustainable behaviours research

Evidence review 2 published with Defra and Consultancy 1

Consultants as carriers of normative isomorphism

Retailer B

Consultancy 3Develops and runs Retailer B programme.Participates in FUSIONS.Special advisor to House of Lords Inquiry.

Programme of product lifecycle analysis for food waste

FUSIONS: FP7 project informing development of common EU food waste policy

WRAP

House of Lords Inquiry (EU Subcommittee D)Receives evidence from WRAP, Defra, FUSIONS, Retailers

Defra

Example of knowledge relationships

Retailer C Other retailers

WRAPWorking through WRAP with other retailers on ‘10 Cities’ initiative. WRAP

secretariat of…

British Retail ConsortiumRetailer C Head of Sustainability works with other retailers on environmental policy advisory

board

IGD(Charity/consultancy to grocery retail

sector)‘All retailers’

supporting a food waste media campaign

run by IGD

Courtauld Commitment

voluntary agreement aimed at improving

resource efficiency and environmental impact of the UK grocery sector

Retailer interactions through intermediaries

Practice Theoretical InsightsPractice theory has been deployed in the sociology of sustainable consumption to critique the role accorded the model of the autonomous, sovereign consumer deployed in sustainability policy initiatives (e.g. Southerton et al, 2004; Shove, 2010).

We do not find this model of the consuming subject nor the discourse of the responsibilised consumer dominant in the domain of food waste.

Where we do find the responsibilised consumer this is better understood as the tactical mobilisation of this figure by collective actors rather than a programme of instantiation.

Retailer interventions into consumer practices address competencies (e.g. recipes, storage advice), seek to incorporate an affective and normative project of food waste reduction into everyday practice – a ‘lay’ practice theoretical approach to social action.

Retailers as intermediaries in ‘sustainable production and consumption’

‘…so if you make small changes at your home, then you can start asking for changes at the supermarket and then they will make changes in their supply chains if they want to keep the customer happy, so if the customers demand change, then [retailers] will make the change.’ (Retailer 3)

‘I think tactically we tend to use the word responsibility as [retailers] have got the power to change what’s happening in the food supply chain and they are the one that call the shots’ (NGO 2)

‘Fundamentally the retailers have a huge amount of responsibility…they sit at a pivotal point. I see it a like a seesaw…because they have an upstream and a downstream influence. Downstream through the supply chain right the way through to the farming field…then on the upstream side, of course, retailers are responsible for marketing. Marketing is very powerful; promotion is very powerful and perceptions of reality. People have had 40/50 years’ of consumerist marketing that’s told them that to demand cheap food.’ (NGO 1)

Global food waste regime (Gille, 2007, 2013)

Waste as a social relation

Waste regimes consist of social institutions and conventions that valorise and regulate the production and distribution of waste

What is taboo? What is excluded from the waste regime?