Dealing with Sustainability Paradoxes: Organizational Quality Standards in German Food Retail and Their Application in Organizational Practice

Food retail faces paradoxical sustainability demands. On the one side, providing food that meets legal and customer demands for fresh and good-looking food is crucial for the food retailers’ economic sustainability. This especially holds for perishable food like fruits and vegetables. On the other side, fulfilling these demands is sensible to ecologic sustainability since it contributes to food waste and thus, contradicts societal demands – manifested in SDG 12 – and the self-commitment of the majority of the (German) food retail groups in this respect.

Food retailers navigate through these paradoxical sustainability demands by defining organizational quality standards for food. However, existing research in the context of German food retail has shown that these standards are defined rather roughly and therefore need to be interpreted. This is up to the shopfloor workers who apply the standards in daily organizational practice by evaluating the food and thus, dealing with the paradoxical economic and ecologic demands in food retail.

Only little is known about how shopfloor workers apply organizational quality standards for food in organizational practice and which factors influence their (e)valuation of food in this respect. While the study focuses on this issue, research indicates that non-quality-related factors (e.g., amount of food on stock, expected food sales, etc.) might influence the application of organizational food quality standards. Moreover, the presence of third party actors that explicitly address food waste (e.g, Foodsharing, Too good to go, etc.) might paradoxically relieve food retail (workers) from a stronger ecologically oriented application of their organizational quality standards.

Against this background, the study investigates dealing with sustainability paradoxes by workers in German food retail through the lens of the sociology of (e)valuation. It empirically focuses on the definition and application of organizational quality standards for food by conducting problem-centered interviews with shopfloor workers and participating observations.