Digitally enabling sustainable food shopping: App glitches, practice conflicts, and digital failure

Christian Fuentes, Olivia Cegrell and Josefine Vesterinen

Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 2021, vol. 61, issue C

Abstract: New digital food platforms are being launched accompanied with the promise of also promoting more sustainable food consumption. However, despite some success, many of these efforts to digitally reconfigure consumers food practices fail. The aim of this paper is to empirically explore, conceptualize and explain such failures. Taking a practice theory approach, and drawing on a field experiment using the Karma app – an anti-food waste app – the paper shows that the inability of this app to promote a new way of acquiring food is due to glitches - app failures of different sorts - but also practice conflicts. Two types of practice conflicts, practice mismatch and practice competition, make the fostering of a new sustainable food provisioning practice difficult.

Keywords: Food shopping; Digital; Practice theory; Sustainable consumption; Food waste (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:joreco:v:61:y:2021:i:c:s0969698921001120

DOI: 10.1016/j.jretconser.2021.102546

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