Multi-Actor Social Networks: A Social Practice Approach to Understanding Food Hubs

Abstract

Food hubs are collaborative entities that strategically manage the assemblage, delivery, and promotion of food from a range of local food producers. They are essentially multi-actor institutions, involving horizontal collaboration between producers and vertical collaborations up and down the food chain, involving all actors required to bring food products from producers to consumers. Although food hubs offer many advantages to both producers and consumers, they remain a recognisably neglected research topic in Europe. Furthermore, the strategic networks of actors involved in these collaborative entities is often overlooked. Empirically, this study draws from a collection of ‘good practices’ gathered for the Short Supply Chain Knowledge and Innovation Network (SKIN) EU-funded H2020 project. Drawing on a social practice approach and network diagrams, this article explores the good practices of three food hub typologies. This study primarily investigates the context in which food hubs practice multi-actor food provision. We apply social practice as a lens to ’zoom in’ and explore the shared materials, meanings and skills that aid such systems of provision. Social network diagrams are utilised to ‘zoom out’ to examine and facilitate the detection of key actors involved in food hubs’ strategic networks. This research addresses the lack of academic attention on European food hubs by placing practice as the central unit of focus. Our approach enables better comprehension of what constitutes a short food supply chain (SFSC) when orchestrated within three main typologies of food hubs. The findings are of interest to researchers, policy makers, agricultural development intermediaries, and actors involved in systems of food provision who are interested in understanding and supporting the functioning of SFSCs.

Sustainable and healthy food consumption in Europe: an analysis of consumer purchase patterns, motivations and barriers towards foods from SFSCs

“…Cleveland et al (2014) contend that food hubs provide many of the benefits of traditional SFSCs (such as harnessing greater profits for primary producers) as well as the advantages associated with conventional supply chains (such as cost efficiencies and offering greater choice to consumers). These collaborative ventures could therefore help consumers access SFSC products more easily while offering a more varied product range than that available from an individual producer (Hyland and Macken-Walsh, 2022). The cost efficiency of the hubs may also enable local products to be priced more competitively.…”

The Impact of COVID-19 on the Food Supply Chain and the Role of E-Commerce for Food Purchasing

“…Two major important challenges within the food supply chain are obtaining raw materials from suppliers and ensuring food transfer from manufacturers to ultimate consumers. These problems are limiting the agricultural sectors' ability to operate normally, and they could have serious ripple effects regarding food quality, freshness, and health, limiting accessibility to markets and causing price increases [26,27]. Governments need to take serious initiatives to reconfigure food supply lines while they fight the virus.…”

Towards understanding SFSC and the pillars of its conceptualisation: Building upon the Community of Practice approach

“…SFSCs are considered as coherent and collaborative food networks of interconnected producers, processors and consumers, distinguished by geographical and social proximity (Dubois, 2018;Chiffoleau et al, 2019;Vittersø et al, 2019). In this context studies on SFSCs have been oriented toward a more participatory approach which sees the active contribution of all stakeholders and actors involved (Zoll et al, 2021;Hyland and Macken-Walsh, 2022). Focusing on actors' engagement in SFSCs scholarship it is widely acknowledged that SFSCs can result in positive impacts and multi-aspect benefits both for actors in food chains and society.…”

“…It is the way different actors interact among themselves and with their external environment that determines the performance and viability of SFSCs. In this view, social actors' practices can be seen as processes that redesign and re-develop their interactions which could result in transformative changes for SFSCs (Hyland and Macken-Walsh, 2022).…”