Cooking for transitioning : a study of social restaurant scaling process

Faced with grand challenges and complex problems, society urgently needs to develop alternative solutions to transition toward a more sustainable model. Among these challenges, food is at the forefront. To tackle the challenge of transitioning toward a sustainable food system, some actors are seeking to develop alternative food systems, referring to actors and initiatives aimed at creating new relationships between producers and consumers, in opposition to intensive agriculture and the domination of multinationals (Michel, 2019).Addressing these major challenges often involves transformative social innovations. This term describe these "shared activities, ideas and objects across locally rooted sustainability initiatives that explore and develop alternatives to incumbent and (perceived) unsustainable regimes that they seek to challenge, alter or replace" (Loorbach et al., 2020, p. 254). Empirical cases of solutions at different stages of the food chain have been explored in the literature (e.g. Colombo et al., 2023; Michel, 2019). More generally, the literature has shown that transformative social innovations are generally seen as emerging from a local problem identified by actors in a region (Mazzei, 2017). However, relatively similar solutions are used in different regions. For example, different models of energy cooperatives exist in different European countries, and even within the same country with nuances depending on the region (Baileche et al., 2024; Bauwens et al., 2020; Geskus et al., 2024). Remains one persistent question : how to scale these innovations.To contrast with conventional definitions of scaling, where the objective is the organization's economic growth, researchers have developed a framework in which scaling refers to maximizing the impact of the organization and its social and environmental mission (Colombo et al., 2023). Different types of scaling routes have been identified theoretically and empirically (e.g. Bauwens et al., 2020; Colombo et al., 2023; Westley et al., 2014). These studies show that scaling is a temporal process, which follows an evolutionary and non-linear This work is in line with the multi-scale perspective of transition processes (Binz et al., 2020; Coenen et al., 2012) to better understand how transformative social innovations develop within and between regions. We contribute to a better understanding of the scaling process of transformative social innovations in two ways. First, by reversing the perspective to the actors who adopt and implement social innovations locally, we extend the actors to be considered and highlight a process that is not unidirectional, but can come from the intentions, resources and actions of actors who adopt and translate innovations. Second, by studying how organizations implement transformative social innovation through placemaking (Cartel et al., 2022; Fohim et al., 2024), we explore how local and extra-local resources are combined to connect their organisation to the local context and materialise in a place.