Chapter 12: A Pathway towards Truly Sustainable Food Supply Chains: Balancing Motivation, Strategy, and Impact

This chapter compares and discusses the 10 sustainability-oriented food supply chain innovations described in the previous chapters. Our purpose is to address and reflect on the questions and challenges introduced in the first chapter.

The cases are first analyzed in terms of the extent to which the innovations were motivated and impacted the social, environmental, and economic dimensions of sustainability. The various sustainable food supply chain practices adopted are compared. The third section explores the innovation strategies used in the cases, including the type of strategy, the breadth and level of innovativeness of the strategy, the governance approach, and the extent of capability development required. The final section presents our conclusions.

The results suggest that to become truly sustainable, companies need to adopt a broad set of practices that address all three dimensions of sustainability, and develop strategies to make the sustainability-oriented innovation economically viable. The more radical and systemic the innovation, the more difficult it is to generate these outcomes.