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After working on the assignment questions, the learners can achieve the following learning outcomes: understand the buying behavior towards sustainable products in the context of mindful consumption and product characteristics, appraise the market segmentation and positioning strategy of a sustainable business, understand the application of 5C’s framework for a sustainable business and critically evaluate a new sustainable business’s challenges in the emerging business environment.

Dr Joe Fenn, founder and director of PFoods, with extensive experience in the pharma industry overseas, observed a decline in the consumption of traditional dairy foods. Alternative plant foods come as a savior to people who are lactose intolerant and offer a host of health benefits with low environmental impact. Riding on the waves of veganism and sustainable foods, he saw an opportunity in India. PFoods developed and launched two products, namely, Just Plants (plant-based milk alternative) and Plotein (plant-based protein alternative), in collaboration with scientists at the Indian Institute of Science, a premier scientific institution in India, and PMEDS (PreEmptive Meds), a US-based nutraceutical Company. PFoods launched and pilot-tested Just Plant, a dairy alternative substitute for milk in select reputed organizations in Bangalore. The upcoming challenges for Fenn would be to select the right segment, educate the market and position the product that would resonate well with the target customers.

The case study suits undergraduate and graduate courses such as marketing management, sustainable marketing and sustainable business. The case study can also be used in entrepreneurship management and entrepreneurial marketing courses to introduce the challenges of a sustainable startup. The case study highlights the marketing challenges faced by the disruptive and growing plant-based foods or alternative dairy industry in emerging markets.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 8: Marketing.

The rising number of food recalls has raised concerns about complexity, globalization and weak governance in the food supply chain. This paper aims to investigate the recall of plant-based products with data from the US Food and Drug Administration.

Introducing the structural topic modeling method allowed us to test theories on recall in the context of sustainable food consumption, enhancing the understanding of food recall processes. This approach helps identify latent topics of product recalls and their interwoven relationships with various stakeholders.

The results answer a standing research call for empirical investigation in a nascent food industry to identify stakeholders’ engagements for food safety crisis management for corporate social responsibility practices. This finding provides novel insights on managing threats to food safety at an industry level to extend existing antecedents and consequences of product recall at a micro level.

For practitioners, this empirical finding may provide insights into stakeholder management and develop evidence-based strategies to prevent threats to food safety. For public policymakers, this analysis may help identify patterns of recalls and assist guidelines and alarm systems (e.g. EU’s Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed) on threats in the food supply chain.

Two detected clusters, such as opportunisms of market actors in the plant-based food system and food culture, from the analysis help understand corporate social responsibility and food safety in the plant-based food industry.

Amidst pressing environmental concerns, the service industry has increased its focus on sustainable production and consumption patterns. This study aims to explore whether Generation Z’s perceived value of plant-based food influences feelings of guilt as a result of consuming meat instead of plant-based food and/or pride from consuming plant-based foods, which might then lead to decisions to purchase alternative plant-based products at restaurants.

A survey was conducted measuring a range of variables and their relationships. The hypothesized model was tested using covariance-based structural equation modeling.

Results showed that perceived social value significantly influenced guilt and pride with perceived emotional value only influencing pride. Both guilt and pride significantly influenced the decision to switch eating patterns from conventional meat to plant-based protein at restaurants. And, finally, environmental concern significantly moderated the effect of emotional value on guilt.

To achieve sustainable goals, food producers should promote plant-based menu items by increasing the awareness of social approval through marketing communications.

This study bridges a gap in the literature by investigating how consumers’ perceived value affects their anticipated emotional feelings of guilt and pride leading to the switch from meat-based to plant-based diets at restaurants.

Both governments and the food industry are interested in plant-based products. New products are advertised as climate-friendly, with plant-based materials increasingly replacing animal-based content. In Finland, oat milk dominates the plant-based milk market. The authors studied what features young and urban users of plant-based and cow's milk value in oat milk for coffee and how the preferences of the users relate to ethical food-choice motives.

In total, 308 students filled in an e-questionnaire. The survey used best-worst scaling (BWS), a discrete choice approach, to measure the perceived values related to oat milk characteristics. The ethical motives were measured by a version of the Lindeman and Väänänen scale. Also the respondents' diets were asked. Preference clusters were identified and viewed with the ethical food-choice motives and diets.

The respondent group that exclusively used cow's milk attached more value to taste, added nutritional elements, discounts and recommendations by friends. The rest of the respondents attached more value to origin and sustainability-related features of oat milk. In the six-cluster solution, one extreme cluster was valuing taste and the other was valuing sustainability-related issues. All the ethical food-choice motives: ecological welfare, political values and religion were (roughly) the higher the cluster valued sustainability-related items. The respondents eating meat were more likely to belong to the clusters valuing taste than non-meat eaters that belong more likely to clusters valuing sustainability-related features.

Very few earlier studies have explored the heterogeneity of valuations of plant-based products and the products' relationship with ethical food-choice motives.

This article examines the dairy value chain in Southern Peru and identifies four critical success factors that can enhance the local situation.

The study employed descriptive research using semi-structured interviews with entrepreneurs from 17 cheese factories across eight districts, namely Azángaro, Ayaviri, Pucara, Lampa, Cabana, Acora, Pomata and Puno. Quantitative market data were also gathered and analyzed alongside qualitative views.

The study identified four critical issues: quality concerns in milk production, suboptimal managerial practices of cheese-processing plants, lack of compliance to regulations, particularly hygiene and environmental ones, and inadequate access to finance. The findings reveal a gap between the practices of the Puno region's dairy industry and world-class standards for cheese production. Urgent actions are required to improve product quality, increase access to finance, enhance managerial education and ensure compliance with regulations.

Results suggest critical issues to be prioritized, but the article does not propose how to solve the problems identified. External factors, such as economic changes, were also not considered. Interviews were conducted exclusively with cheese processing entrepreneurs, not milk producers.

This case study provides an insight into the interior of Peru, an under-researched region facing several development challenges. The findings have significant implications for dairy value chain stakeholders in Peru and other similar contexts.

The purpose of our study is to investigate how a manufacturing plant’s internal operations along with its network of connections (upstream and downstream) can have an impact on its recovery time from a disruption. The authors also examine the inverse-U impact of complexity. Finally, the authors test the moderating role that business continuity management plans (BCP) at the plant level have on recovery time.

To test our hypotheses, the authors partnered with Resilinc Corporation, a Silicon Valley-based provider of supply chain risk management solutions to identify focal firms’ suppliers, customers and plant-level data including information on parts, manufacturing activities, bill of materials, alternate sites and formal business continuity plans. The authors employed censored data regression technique (Tobit).

Several important findings reveal that the plant’s internal operations and network connections impact recovery time. Specifically, the number of parts manufactured at the plant as well as the number of internal plant processes significantly increase disruption recovery time. In addition, the number of supply chains (upstream and downstream) involving the plant as well as the echelon distance of the plant from its original equipment manufacturer significantly increase recovery time. The authors also find that there exists an inverted-U relationship between complexity and recovery time. Finally, the authors find partial support that BCP will have a negative moderating effect between complexity and recovery time.

This research highlights gaps in the literature related to supply chain disruption and recovery. There is a need for more accurate methods to measure recovery time, more research on recovery at the supply chain site level and further analysis of the impact of supply chain complexity on recovery time.

This paper examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on low-carbon consumption of dairy products through informational interventions. The empirical findings seek to enlighten developing countries' efforts in coping with climate change and potential dietary transitions.

A randomized controlled trial was designed to examine the effects of purpose-differentiated information interventions on individual dairy consumption. The experiment recruited and randomly assigned 1,002 college students into four groups to receive (or not) environmental or/and health information interventions.

The empirical analysis finds that health and combined information interventions have a positive impact on dairy consumption, while environmental information interventions' effect on dairy consumption is insignificant. In the context of the pandemic, health information interventions positively affected participants' perceptions and preferences for dairy products by delivering knowledge about their role in boosting immunity. However, environmental information interventions failed to do the same things as their insignificant effects on both perception and preference.

Macro-external shocks, such as public health events, may offset the impact of universal information interventions promoting pro-environmental behaviors. For a smooth dietary transition to achieve long-term environmental sustainability, diverse stakeholders must be included in more individualized interventions to guide daily consumption, especially in developing countries with large populations.

Given the lack of focus on a standardized measurement framework (e.g. benchmarking tool) to assess and quantify complexity within the supply chain, this study has developed a unified supply chain complexity (SCC) index and validated its utility by examining the relationship with firm performance. More importantly, it examines the role of firm owners' business knowledge, sales strategy and board management on the relationship between SCC and firm performance.

In this study, the unit of analysis is Indian manufacturing companies listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE). This research has merged panel data from two secondary data sources: Bloomberg and Prowess and empirically operationalized five key SCC drivers, namely, number of suppliers, the number of supplier countries, the number of products, the number of plants and the number of customers. The study employs panel data regression analyses to examine the proposed conceptual model and associated hypotheses. Moreover, the present study employs models that incorporate robust standard errors to account for heteroscedasticity.

The results show that complexity has a negative and significant effect on firm performance. Further, the study reveals that an owner's business knowledge and the firm's effective sales strategy and board management can significantly lessen the negative effect of SCC.

This study develops an SCC index and validates its utility. Also, it presents a novel idea to operationalize the measure for SCC characteristics using secondary databases like Prowess and Bloomberg.

The purpose of this paper is to present a novel qualitative activity focus group (AFG) method for studying consumption practices. This participatory method, which is inspired by practice-theoretical thinking, combines focus group discussions with activities that represent the practices at the centre of the research.

The application of the AFG method is demonstrated with an empirical study of the transition to plant-based food consumption practices in Finland, involving four group sessions of 13 participants.

The findings from the empirical application of the AFG method illustrate that its key strength is the ability to foster fruitful and natural discussions on routine consumption practices that connect with discursive and practical dimensions and thus generate multidimensional data in resource-efficient ways.

The AFG method extends the methodological approaches in practice theory–oriented research, responding to the call for creative, real-life-reflecting methods that are able to grasp the discursive and embodied dimensions of practices. The method is proposed to be particularly suitable for research on mundane consumption practices.