Food retailers’ sustainable brand image - exploring the barriers and challenges of implementing sustainability strategies in grocery stores

Abstract

Food retailers and their local stores are considered to have an influential role in our society today, in terms of their impact in environmental and social issues. This qualitative case study aims to analyze the work of food retailers with sustainability, focusing on their processes of trying to make sustainable commitments reflect with consumers’ perception of the corporate brand image. This analysis also attempts to distinguish the role of local grocery stores in this development. The purpose is to get a better understanding in the barriers and challenges for food retailers to implement corporate sustainable strategies in local grocery stores to strengthen and establish a consistent sustainable brand image. To fulfill the purpose, data were collected through semi-structured interviews with five Swedish food retailers, together with secondary data from the organizations’ sustainability reports. Interviews were conducted with store managers and representatives from headquarters in order to gain insights from both store-level as well as headquarter-level. The case companies were chosen based on their ranking on the Sustainable Brand Index 2019; examining consumers’ perception of Swedish businesses’ brand in relation to sustainability. The findings of this study indicate that the role of the local grocery stores is of great importance for food retailers, to visualize and demonstrate their commitments in sustainability. This is actualized through various in-store activities where consumers encounter information of sustainable initiatives or engage with other more tangible activities. There do however exist barriers and challenges for food retailers to implement certain sustainable strategies in stores. These challenges are perceived to in a great extent be affected by how well the organizations facilitate store managers and headquarters to communicate and cooperate with each other. Including, how food retailers manage to continuously work with sustainability strategies in accordance with the market’s context. The consequence is believed to imply a lack of motivation and understanding among some store managers, as well as a difficulty among headquarters to adapt their strategies to the stores' local operations and demands. With potential inconsistencies in how local stores perceive and adopt sustainable strategies, it will most likely also affect the consistency in how sustainability is communicated towards consumers. Which evidently may also influence consumers’ associations of the food retailers’ sustainable brand image.