Value co-creation in the beverage and food industry

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to define and describe how consumers may constitute an integral part of small and medium enterprises’ (SMEs) value co-creation process in the food and beverage (F&B) industry, and to provide practicable implementation recommendations to firms in the Piedmont region that are important and prominent in this sector. Design/methodology/approach The research methodology rests on a multiple case study design, applied to three F&B Piedmont SMEs that produce beer, water and starters: Baladin, Lurisia and Galfré. Findings Results show an increasing awareness by firms of the important role played by customers in value co-creation, though limited to specific roles in the case of SMEs. Research limitations/implications The research is limited by its exploratory nature, though the findings and conclusions drawn provide a solid foundation for further development and testing on the subject. Practical implications The case studies’ results allow the reader to understand the importance of the increasing awareness of the role played by customers in value co-creation, especially on the WWB, where costs are minimizing. Originality/value The research’s value stems from fact that there are few existing studies on the ways to engage customers in value co-creation. Moreover, these studies, contrary to the present research, are largely theoretical and either have no direct applicability or are limited to a single case.

Co-Creating Value in Sustainable and Alternative Food Networks: The Case of Community Supported Agriculture in New Zealand

“…A final point concerns the application of the framework of co-creation in CSA consumption patterns, which is innovative in comparison to traditional food industry practices [100,101], with their top-down perspective of the company to the consumers. In sharp contrast, the strength of the CSA format, as reported by consumers and producers in the present research, lies in the way that co-creation is expressed-as a full engagement of the actors in all the activities, so that the consumer can really understand what happens when choosing this food model and can feel deeply attached to it, investing a part of their identity as consumers.…”

Open Innovation in the Agri-Food Sector: Perspectives from a Systematic Literature Review and a Structured Survey in MSMEs

“…As seen, this rank is dominated by European countries that develop research related to open innovation in the agri-food field. Italy is the country with the highest number of publications, with 12 reports [1,7,15,[47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55], followed by the Netherlands and Spain, with 7 and 5, respectively. Outside the European continent, Israel is a highly productive country, with four articles [56][57][58][59].…”

“…The journals with the highest impact and number publications can be observed in Figure 4. From the selection, the journal with the highest number of articles is the British Food Journal with nine reports [7,14,15,48,52,53,[64][65][66]. This is a journal with more than 120 years of history focused on research applied to the food industry.…”

“…The data was used to create a cluster diagram from the top 8 keywords (Figure 6). With seven citations between keywords of the set of documents [30,48,52,64,66,68,72], the development of new products is one of the most recurrent applications for the open innovation approach, especially within the food industry. Eco-innovation is another sub-sector study of growing interest in relation to open innovation [32,33,74].…”

The Role of Consumer Influences in the New Product Development of Packaged Food and Beverage Ventures

“…Furthermore, small ventures can have greater pressure for new products to succeed fast due to more limited reserve resources to sustain operations in the face of lacking revenue. Thus, meeting customer needs and expectations is of utmost importance for them (Tardivo et al, 2017;Ngugi et al 2010). Among various industries, the food industry provides a particularly intriguing arena for examining customer involvement in small companies' NPD processes.…”