Truly Sustainable Strategies - Defining business strategies that positively contribute to relevant sustainability challenges in the food sector

This research aims to concretize the concept of truly sustainable strategies. Looking at literature and practice of sustainability strategies, it becomes apparent that the definitions and interpretations of the concept highly differ in their underlying understanding of business sustainability (BST). Due to the dominance of financial success in value creation, businesses fail to address societal needs which leads to a disconnect between business activities and the state of the planet. Dyllick and Muff (2016) develop a typology, which distinguishes different levels of BST in order to explore the reason for the disconnect. Accordingly, true business sustainability is characterized by a shift to an outside-in perspective, so that relevant societal challenges are taken as a starting point for strategy development. However, it has to be further specified how such an outside-in perspective can be operationalized in a specific sector and how it impacts the business strategy development process, e.g. how a business can identify relevant challenges and how a strategic fit between societal relevance and core competencies can actually be created. Further, elements that constitute truly sustainable strategies have not been defined, yet. Therefore, this conceptual research aims to specify the outside-in perspective by clarifying what strategic approaches look like that enable companies to make significant contributions to relevant sustainability challenges in the food sector. By integrating insights from a systematic literature analysis and explorative interviews, relevant sustainability challenges in the food sector will be defined. Further, truly sustainable strategies will be characterized by developing a clear set of criteria and facilitators for their development. The results will be integrated into a systematic and holistic framework of truly sustainability strategy. The final conceptualization will be done by integrating the empirical insights of the expert interviews with the insights of the literature analysis.