Innovations Needed in Retail and in the Food Value Chain

Introductory Speakers:

Dr. Lucia Reisch, Professor of Consumer Behaviour and consumer policy, Copenhagen, Business School

Louise Ungerth, Head of consumer and environmental affairs, Stockholm Consumer Cooperative Society

About the workshop:

The goal of this workshop is to find ways to bend global and local value chains so that they can have a positive impact on children's health and contribute towards reducing childhood obesity. This means identifying the source of child obesity, and where in the chain we can intervene with strategies, policies, and organizational innovations. Can these strategies/policies be developed in a way that they also become instruments of sustainable development – say by inclusion of farmers and local industry?

The focus areas for the workshop are:

  • Understanding further the role of the global value chains in transforming food consumption patterns in developing countries
  • To explore alternative institutional innovations and organizational forms of global food giants, in ways that will move towards reducing (bending) the trend of child obesity
  • To explore ways of involving the local food value chains – including farmers – into contributing to improve nutritional intake and food quality while at the same time making it profitable to farmers. In other words so that "ending child obesity" can be  a profitable business and a vehicle for rural development.

Workshop prepared by: Professor Konstantin Karantininis, Dept. of Economics, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, SLU.

Last modified: 2021-08-19