Is there sustainable entrepreneurship in the wine industry? Exploring Sicilian wineries participating in the SOStain program

Abstract

Global climate change and the accelerating depletion of natural resources have contributed to increase discussions about the role of private enterprises in reversing negative environmental trends. Rather than focusing on profit maximization, policy makers and consumers pressure groups expect firms to meet a triple-bottom line of economic, environmental and social value creation. Hence sustainable entrepreneurship has received recently increasing interest as a phenomenon and a research topic. More recently, the concept of sustainability has been taken seriously in the Italian wine industry. The organizational challenge for entrepreneurship is to better integrate social and environmental performance into the economic business logic. The aim of this manuscript is to illustrate, through a descriptive approach, the adaptation of the wine industry to the new scenario of sustainable entrepreneurship. To reach this goal we carried out an explorative analysis of 3 Sicilian wineries involved in the SOStain program, which aims at the improvement of sustainability in the wine industry. The findings of the analysis show the existence of sustainability-driven entrepreneurship, in which the wineries undertake to behave ethically and contribute to economic development while improving the quality of life for the workforce, their families, the local and global community as well as future generations

Agri-Food Markets towards Sustainable Patterns

“…These processes occur in production, in agro-food policy and in the food supply chain" (p. 937) so that a genuine agri-food transition "implies changes in the inputs and farming practices used at farm level and regional levels, changes in the supply chain structures, and changes in the political and market institutions" (p. 938). Referring to the first aspect, over the past decades, many agri-food organizations have incorporated sustainability into their business thinking [28,[298][299][300][301][302][303] in order to address pressures from government legislation, international standards, and customers. Therefore, they improved their production activities performance related to the three pillars of sustainability-people, planet and profit (i.e., social equity, respect for the environment and economic growth)-namely by balancing business performance and economic gains with environmental and social issues.…”

Assessing the Effects of the Environment on Consumers’ Evaluations for Wine

“…Recently, companies operating in the agro-food industry have adopted business models related to environmental, economic and social sustainability (Schimmenti et al, 2016;Galati et al, 2019a). The wine industry has implemented initiatives aimed at both sustainability and changes in consumer behaviour, as purchasing decisions are increasingly influenced by environmental and social aspects, and at identifying web-marketing behavioural models (Galati et al, 2017;Iaia et al, 2017;Capitello et al, 2019).…”

The Industrial Symbiosis of Wineries: An Analisys of the Wine Production Chain According to the Preliminary LCA Model

“…The standards provided by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) describe the four main phases of an LCA: "goal and scope", "inventory analysis", "impact assessment," and "interpretation." These standards have been developed by the ISO/TC 207 Technical Committee and they are: UNI EN ISO 14040 (1998) [2,3], by which the principles and the requirements for an LCA study are established; UNI EN ISO 14041 (1999), in which the objective and the field of application are defined and an inventory analysis is performed; UNI EN ISO 14042 (2000), that evaluates impacts: in particular, the main impact categories to be taken into consideration are the use of resources, human health, and ecological consequences; finally, with the UNI EN ISO 14043 (2000), improvements are analyzed. According to the ISO standards on LCA, it can assist in: identifying opportunities to improve the environmental features of products at various points in their life cycle; decision making in industry, governmental or nongovernmental organizations (e.g., strategic planning, priority setting, product and process design or redesign); selection of relevant indicators of environmental performance, including measurement techniques; and marketing (e.g., an environmental claim, eco-labeling scheme, or environmental product declarations).…”

“…Moreover, the wine industry is an important contributor to the Italian economy, as it registers a sales volume of 9.5 billion euros. Sicily, in particular, widely contributes to the Italian wine industry: it is the region with the largest area of vineyards (for a total of 111,000 hectares), corresponding to around 17% of the overall Italian vineyard area and to 10.4% of the Italian total grapes production [3].…”