Sustainable Food Consumption Practices: How Marketing can Contribute to Institutional Change

Over the past 20 years, health and environmental issues have led to the reshaping of a more sustainable or resilient agriculture and to increased sales of organic and local products. However, organic food accounts for only $4 billion in Canada, barely 2 to 3% of total annual food consumption, and direct-to-consumer markets represent only 3% of Quebecers' food consumption. As sustainable consumption patterns became more prevalent, the food retail landscape had to adapt and has dramatically changed. Thus, Walmart is the largest retailer of organic products in Canada. Some other retail giants have bought chains of health food stores. In the meantime, direct-to-consumer types of retailing emerged while traditional public and farmers markets enjoyed a return to popularity. Academic literature in management, more scarcely in marketing, have focused on the process of legitimation, either of conventional grocery stores , natural food stores or "alternative food systems". Thus, researchers used to oppose or to study separately the different types of retailing. This paper aims to propose through an ethnographic study a more integrative and global understanding of the dynamics of change in the organizational field of sustainable food through neo-institutional theory (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Scott, 1995). It highlights particularly the lack of pragmatic legitimacy despite the institutional work of individual actors in order to influence the cognitive, normative and regulative pillars of food consumption.