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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.

Technology-based food innovations are likely to face opposition in consumer acceptance despite certain perceived benefits. This study investigates distrust in scientists as a barrier to cultured meat acceptance and its interplay with positive drivers. For the latter, this study draws upon higher-order values (universalism) and domain-specific innovativeness.

This study proposes a conceptual model, which is empirically tested using an online survey of Austrian consumers (n = 509) and structural equation modelling.

First, this study provides empirical support for the inhibiting role of distrust in scientists on the acceptance of cultured meat. Second, universalism and domain-specific innovativeness both positively impact consumers' behavioural intentions. Third, this study finds that consumers' innovativeness mitigates the negative effect of distrust in scientists on the willingness to try cultured meat, whereas the value of universalism does not moderate this negative effect.

The findings are strategically useful for companies in the innovative food sector in terms of segmentation and targeting. For both companies and policymakers, the impeding role of distrust in scientists for technology-based food innovations depicts an aspect that might be considered relevant to be addressed.

This study adds to the current body of knowledge about consumer acceptance of technology-based food innovations, such as cultured meat, by jointly examining the relevance of human values, domain-specific innovativeness and distrust in scientists as well as their interactions to explain behavioural intentions.

The goal of the present research was to resolve two problems with contemporary methods used to assess consumer food waste: the lack of established categories of food wasting behaviours and difficulties in assessing food waste. In Studies 1 A and 1 B, a five-factor questionnaire for measuring food wasting behaviours was developed. Study 2 and Exploratory analyses verified whether the questionnaire allows for predicting the amount of wasted meat, dairy and bakery and a range of socioeconomic characteristics.

Based on pre-registered studies, a new questionnaire for measuring the frequency of food wasting behaviours, the Food Wasting Behaviours Questionnaire (FWBQ), was developed.

The results provided evidence that behaviours associated with food wasting could be narrowed down to five distinctive basic categories: (1) discarding food because of its' unpalatability; (2) preventing food waste through buying only the necessities; (3) preventing food waste through planning; (4) preventing food waste through sharing and (5) preventing food waste through feeding animals. The FWBQ allowed for investigating the socio-economic factors that influence food wasting behaviour. Finally, the FWBQ allowed for predicting the amount of wasted meat, dairy and bakery products. Also, particular factors were associated with a range of socioeconomic characteristics.

The FWBQ has been shown to be an inexpensive and easy-to-use method for systematising distinct categories of food wasting behaviours and demonstrating their determinants. The study takes an empirical approach (rather than intuitive) to distinguish separate categories of food wasting.

Policy for women's entrepreneurship is designed to promote economic growth, not least in depleted rural areas, but very little is known about the contributions of rural women entrepreneurs, their needs or how the existing policy is received by them. Using a theoretical framework developed by Korsgaard et al. (2015), the authors analyse how rural women entrepreneurs contribute to rural development and discuss the implications for entrepreneurship policy. This paper aims to focus on the aforementioned objectives.

The authors interviewed 32 women entrepreneurs in rural Sweden representing the variety of businesses in which rural Swedish women are engaged. The authors analysed their contributions to rural development by analysing their motives, strategies and outcomes using Korsgaard et al.’s framework of “entrepreneurship in the rural” and “rural entrepreneurship” as a heuristic, interpretative device.

Irrespective of industry, the respondents were deeply embedded in family and local social structures. Their contributions were substantial, multidimensional and indispensable for rural viability, but the policy tended to bypass most women-owned businesses. Support in terms of business training, counselling and financing are important, but programmes especially for women tend to miss the mark, and so does rural development policy. More important for rural women entrepreneurs in Sweden is the provision of good public services, including for example, schools and social care, that make rural life possible.

Theoretically, the findings question the individualist and a-contextual focus of much entrepreneurship research, as well as the taken-for-granted work–family divide. How gender and how the public and the private are configured varies greatly between contexts and needs contextual assessment. Moreover, the results call for theorising place as an entrepreneurial actor.

Based on the findings, the authors advise future policymakers to gender mainstream entrepreneurship policy and to integrate entrepreneurship and rural development policy with family and welfare state policy.

The paper highlights how rural women respond to policy, and the results are contextualised, making it possible to compare them to other contexts. The authors widen the discussion on contributions beyond economic growth, and the authors show that policy for public and commercial services and infrastructure is indeed also policy for entrepreneurship.

This study identifies new factors influencing the adoption of two recently promoted messages in Canada's updated food guide (FG): enhancing pleasure of eating healthy foods (PEHFs) and shifting food choices towards plant protein foods. Currently, limited and contradictory evidence is available regarding associations between environmental values, nutrition literacy, PEHFs, and plant/animal protein food consumption.

An online survey measuring environmental values; nutrition literacy, distinctively based on previous (2007) and most recent (2019) FG messages; PEHFs; and annual changes in the consumption of protein foods was sent to Quebec residents (N = 128).

Greater nutrition literacy of both 2007 and 2019 FGs and greater environmental values were associated with greater PEHFs (ß = 0.248, p < 0.01; ß = 0.209, p < 0.05; ß = 0.423, p < 0.001, respectively). Greater PEHFs was associated with greater consumption of plant protein foods (ß = 0.405, p < 0.001). Greater nutrition literacy of the 2007 FG was associated with greater consumption of animal protein foods (ß = 0.409, p < 0.001), whereas greater nutrition literacy of the 2019 FG was linked to lower consumption of animal protein foods (ß = −0.225, p < 0.05).

Enhancing PEHFs may require increasing general FG nutrition literacy and strengthening environmental values. To encourage plant protein food consumption and decrease animal protein food consumption, the authors recommend promoting PEHFs and increasing nutrition literacy based on newest FG recommendations.

This new evidence may help develop strategies promoting PEHFs and plant protein food consumption, thus increasing uptake of new FG recommendations.

Despite the pervasiveness of teen-targeted food advertising on social media, little is known about the persuasive elements (or power) found within those ads. This research study aims to engage with the concept of “visual style” to explore the range of visual techniques used in Instagram food marketing to teenagers.

A participatory study was conducted with 57 teenagers, who used a specially designed mobile app to capture images of the teen-targeted food marketing they encountered for seven days. A visual thematic analysis was used to assess and classify the advertisements that participants captured from Instagram and specifically tagged with “visual style”.

A total of 142 food advertisements from Instagram were tagged with visual style, and classified into five main styles: Bold Focus, Bespoke, Absurd, Everyday and Sensory.

This study contributes to an improved understanding about how the visual is used as a marketing technique to capture teenagers’ attention, contributing to the persuasive power of marketing messages.

Food marketing is a significant part of the young consumer’s marketplace, and this study provides new insight into the sophisticated nature of such marketing – revealing the visual styles used to capture the attention of its brand-aware audience.

This study aims to analyse the components of sustainable business models (SBMs) in the dairy industry, in relation to firm-relevant organisational features (size, ownership structure and production process) and through the lenses of the business model framework and the sustainable value exchange matrix (SVEM). This contribution proposes a taxonomy of emerging SBMs and sustainable value creation in the dairy industry.

This research makes use of a multiple case study approach, with cases selected in collaboration with industry experts. The selected firms are highly committed to sustainability transition. Results are drawn from qualitative data obtained from in-depth interviews and secondary sources. The interpretation phases, initially based on open coding, have been enriched by applying the components of business models (BMs) frameworks and the SVEM, and the analyses have been enhanced through an additional interpretative workshop with experts.

The authors related the BMs characteristics of some typical dairy firms transitioning to sustainability, using SBM components and taxonomies emerging in the literature, based on the formalisation of sustainability practices, the scope of operations, and the degree of integration of the three dimensions of sustainable value. These findings led to the discovery of three types of SBM in this dairy industry, referred to as “Milky Ways”.

This paper contributes to the scant literature on sustainability in dairy firms, highlighting the different paths followed by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), cooperatives and large companies in remoulding their business models towards sustainability and thus achieving sustainable value creation.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effect of almond milk supplementation on the growth and viability of Lacticaseibacillus rhamnosus GR-1 (LGR-1) in yogurt samples over 6 h of fermentation and 30 days of refrigerated storage.

Four yogurt treatments (T1–T4) were inoculated with the probiotic strain L. rhamnosus GR-1 and fermented for 6 h at 37°C and then placed in refrigerated storage at 4°C for 30 days. Microbial and pH analysis of each sample was conducted every 2  h throughout the fermentation period and on Days 1, 15 and 30 of cold storage to determine the viability of L. rhamnosus GR-1.

All samples achieved mean microbial counts of at least 108 CFU/mL during fermentation and storage. During fermentation, mean microbial counts increased for all treatments; however, differences in mean microbial counts between treatments were not significant. During storage, the mean microbial count for T4 at 15 and 30  days was significantly higher (p = 0.031) than microbial counts on Day 1. However, mean microbial counts did not differ significantly across all storage time points for treatments 1, 2 and 3 (p > 0.05). These results suggest that the addition of almond milk, in combination with cow’s milk, is suitable for propagating and preserving the viability of L. rhamnosus GR-1 in yogurt.

There is a consumer shift towards plant-based products due to health, environmental and ethical reasons. Almond milk is a popular nondairy alternative that provides enhanced nutritional value to traditionally dairy-based probiotic yogurts. L. rhamnosus GR-1 is an especially beneficial probiotic for women as it colonizes the gut and vaginal epithelium, promoting urogenital health, including preventing the recurrence of urinary tract infections and bacterial vaginosis.