‘ReSus’: Retail for change - Sustainable food production through collaborative commitments

The retail sector sits at the heart of the food system.

Given that only three actors represent 90% of the sales value in Swedish retail, increased engagement from these actors could lead to large scale production improvements.

Corporate biosphere stewardship is a burgeoning concept gaining momentum as the private sector mobilizes to reach key sustainability targets, and adhering retailers have recently launched numerous supply side sustainability initiatives.

There is however little knowledge about how well initiatives work in addressing impacts and how retailers’ ability to push and pull producers towards improved practices can be increased.

The overarching goal of this project is to leverage the unrealized potential of retailers in enabling the shift to sustainable production.

Specifically, we aim to analyse (i) the effectiveness of existing and emerging retail led sustainability initiatives and (ii) how to enable retailers to facilitate for producers to shift to more plant-based and organic production in Sweden.

A third objective (iii) is to explore how pre-competitive collaboration could be implemented in Swedish retail as an engine for change.

This transdisciplinary project involves researchers and public and private sector partners, including active collaboration from the largest retailers in Sweden.

We will concretely develop case studies and a dialogue space which leverages the retail sector’s capacity to enable the acceleration towards food system transformation.