To collaborate and innovate for sustainability: Food retailers and their external partners

Abstract

Firms collaborate with various organisations to address social and environmental issues. The existing literature has discussed such partnerships’ success factors and the opportunities they present, but few studies have provided an overview of the use of partnerships in the context of firms’ sustainability initiatives. This study investigated such sustainability partnerships, focusing on partnership mechanisms and choices of partners over time. Data were collected from 12 European retailers in the agri-food sector from 2014 through 2018 and analysed using content analysis methods. The analysis showed that during this period, the frequency of partnerships supporting philanthropic endeavours declined. Retailers simultaneously increased their use of partnerships to engage in sustainability-oriented innovation. They increasingly partnered with sustainability ventures while decreasing their partnerships with non-governmental organisations (NGOs). These changes in mechanism and partner choice may reflect a shift in retailers’ objectives from mainly engaging in legitimacy-oriented partnerships to exploring more participation in competence-oriented partnerships.