| dc.description.abstract | Food production is a primary cause of biodiversity loss and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
This paper emphasises the need for a more sustainable food value chain through circular economy principles. The existing research argues that collaborations between different players in the food value chain are crucial for addressing negative environmental and social impacts. This paper proposes using global value chain theory to assess circular food collaborations, focusing on governance types and value chain upgrading to achieve economic, social, and environmental benefits within the circular food value chain.
A qualitative comparative design was used to explore how companies with different governance types manage collaborations to achieve various forms of value chain upgrading. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with companies involved in producing food products from waste or low-value streams, as well as other collaborators, including a facility company coordinating national government catering.
Two new governance types were coined: ‘Local Social’ and ‘Easy Exchange’. Local Social governance promotes high economic upgrading through collaborative innovation and a strong focus on locality. This governance type integrates logistics, branding, marketing, and R&D, resulting in environmental and economic upgrading. The Easy Exchange governance type faced challenges in generating sales due to marketing issues and Dutch consumers' unpreparedness for the product. The results of this study emphasise the importance of knowledge exchange to mitigate complexity in the value chain, highlighting two methods: long-term relationship-based knowledge sharing and codification. Next, The results of this study emphasize the significance of high capabilities in the supply-base, by the ability to produce high-quality products and provide CO2-impact numbers, especially in Local Social and modular value chains. Social upgrading tends to occur at the firm level rather than the collaboration level.
The paper concludes by suggesting further research to enhance the reliability, internal validity, and transferability of circular economy governance practices, particularly in the context of Easy Exchange governance. Moreover, managerial implications highlight the importance of collaborations in mitigating complexity and facilitating information and knowledge exchange. High complexity requires knowledge transfer through either codification or long-term personal relations between the parties in the collaboration. Additionally, high supply-base capabilities are crucial for catering to governmental companies now and in the future for all catering companies. | |
