Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

Ecological threats such as global warming and biodiversity loss are disrupting our planet and societies. Food systems have a primary role in addressing these threats, resolving food insecurity, inequality and so forth, and thus they are vital in achieving societal sustainability goals. Organizations’ efforts in food and beverage retail are of paramount importance in attaining these goals, given their power and strategic position in food value chains. Transitioning to sustainable business practices presents numerous difficulties, which are being tackled with the support of a variety of methods and tools. Digitalization of sustainability tools is a contemporary trend and empirical research is just getting started. The contribution of this project was to investigate, with a case study, the implementation of a digital sustainability platform and identify the ways in which it supports an organization’s sustainability targets. A conceptual framework based on sustainability strategy, network stakeholder theory and a holistic view was used to guide the data collection and analysis. Interviews with sustainability managers revealed benefits, challenges and outcomes of mapping and analyzing supply chains on the platform. Benefits included improved supply chain understanding, ability to focus on key indicators, data-driven decision making and unexpected additional uses. Challenges concerned diversity of suppliers, variety of sustainability indicators and hindrances to transparency. The outcomes were interconnected at different organizational levels and to stakeholders. The sustainability platform is promising but it is no magic stick, it requires stakeholder collaboration, integration of the tool with organizational strategies and a holistic approach to sustainability.