Food retailing – a comparative analysis of handling organic and conventional food products

The food sector is facing a number of environmental challenges in the future, e.g. waste minimizing or reducing climate change (Sonesson et al 2010, Gustavsson 2010). The food sector is also facing organisational challenges e.g. long chains between farmers and consumers (Soler et al 2010). Therefore the need to be able to describe product flows in the food sector is raising e.g. environmentally adapted production and consumption. The retailer is one the main actor handling product flows, the gatekeeper between producer and consumer (Kogg 2009, Mont et al 2013). On the one hand, retailers are taking in more and more organic products and on the other hand facing the climate labelling, and need to think about their own contribution. What is the retailer’s environmental contribution? The difference between organic and conventional products have been studied (Meier et al 2014, Organic research centre 2010, Davis et al 2011, Nilsson 2006). However, is there a difference between retailer’s handling? The question is answered with help of an actor based LCA method. The results are based on a case study on a large Swedish food retailer including interviews and document studies on routines for purchasing, storing, and transport, as well as product volume, energy and waste data. The results are complemented and compared with existing swedish LCA studies of organic and conventional food products (Sonesson et al 2011, Davis et al 2011, Nilsson 2006), such as the LCA studies on organic milk, egg, pork, and apples, complemented with studies on bananas (Stoessel et al 2010, Roibas 2014) and cod (Winther et al 2009)