Sustainable Purchasing in Food Retailing: Interorganizational Relationship Management to Green Product Supply

Abstract

Stakeholders’ demands for product sustainability redefine the focus of corporate purchasing strategies from the traditional concern with financial performance to considerations of ‘triple bottom line’ viability. This adds to the complexity of managing interorganizational relationships and poses a question regarding corporate ability to effectively leverage suppliers over environmental and social performance of supplied goods. Since it is not clear what type of purchasing relationship is more favorable for greening a product supply, the current paper aims to investigate how food retailers manage their relationships with suppliers in order to influence the environmental and social performance of procured goods and improve the availability of sustainably produced supply. The research is based on two case studies of Swedish supermarkets and supplementary semi‐structured interviews with Swedish, British and Danish supermarkets. The results of the study contribute to the existing body of academic knowledge in the field of sustainable supply chain management by developing a typology of sustainable purchasing relationships with detailed insights into the nature of collaborative practices, structure of incentives, sustainability ambition, and approaches to verification of compliance. The study has also revealed the dependence of sustainable purchasing relationships on the characteristics of the procurement context, namely the presence of well‐established sustainability certification schemes, perceived by purchaser's situation with availability of sustainability certified supply and purchaser's interpretation of the state of power dependence in relationships with suppliers. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

Collaboration for Sustainability in the Food Supply Chain: A Multi-Stage Study in Italy

“…The identification of type of collaborative relationship implemented is the first step in our analysis that will help to better describe the sustainability approach in different FSC stages. Furthermore, collaboration for sustainability in the supply chain is said to have an effect on performance as mentioned in previous literature [2,7,28,29]. However, research has focused so far on the focal company performance that is described as the actor actually driving the collaboration.…”

“…Collaboration for sustainability in the supply chain is a relatively new topic in literature [26,27] Literature has studied "green" collaborative relationships in the supply chain but a broader sustainability perspective, including economic, environmental and/or social areas, is rather unusual [25,28,29]. Nonetheless, authors recognized that collaboration for sustainability would help firms to develop resources and competences that otherwise would not be possible, with the ultimate goal of achieving competitive advantage [2,7,18,[27][28][29].…”

“…Nonetheless, authors recognized that collaboration for sustainability would help firms to develop resources and competences that otherwise would not be possible, with the ultimate goal of achieving competitive advantage [2,7,18,[27][28][29].…”

“…However, as recognized by [28,29], studies have focused on analyzing environmental and operational collaboration and the social perspective is still rarely studied.…”

Signaling Product Quality Information in Supply Chains via Corporate Social Responsibility Choices

“…Silvestre [35] reports on the implementation and management of supply chain sustainability in developing and emerging economies. Chkanikova [36] investigates how food retailers manage their relationships with suppliers in order to influence the environmental and social performance of procured goods and improve the availability of sustainable product supply.…”