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Relationship Patterns in Food Purchase: Observing Social Interactions in Different Shopping Environments

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Abstract

The social dimension of purchase seems particularly important when it comes to food, since it can contribute to foster “consumers’ embeddedness” in the local food system. The discussion on this topic is growing after the emergence of alternative food networks (AFNs), which are thought to have potentials to re-connect the different actors of local food systems, and/or to strengthen the existing social ties among them. This study focuses on the evaluation of the degree of sociality in different food shopping environments. The research is focused on the structure and the features of the interactions, with the aim to provide an assessment of the degree of sociality of AFNs compared to other food chain networks. More specifically, a farmers’ market, a greengrocer and a supermarket have been compared. The three shopping environments show remarkable differences: in the supermarket perfunctory interactions are most often observed, unless shoppers already know each other, whereas the farmers’ market environment is likely to foster quite intense relations among strangers; the greengrocer, on the contrary, shows a completely different pattern of relations, typically involving customers who already know each other. Results support the common argument that farmers’ markets may enhance sociality among people, although some interesting relations patterns are observed in the other food stores as well. Issues for further research in the field emerge, which might be useful to improve the understanding of the social dimension of food shopping as well as to more deeply analyse the elements of attractiveness of AFNs.

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Notes

  1. A wider discussion on these topics is provided in the recent paper by the JRC of the European commission “Short Food Supply Chains and Local Food Systems in the EU. A State of Play of their Socio-Economic Characteristics” by Moya Kneafsey, Laura Venn, Ulrich Schmutz, Liz Trenchard, Trish Eyden-Wood, Elizabeth Bos, Gemma Sutton and Matthew Blackett, 2013.

  2. The outputs of the correlations, Chi square and ANOVA analyses cited in the text are shown in “Appendix”.

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Acknowledgments

This work develops on data gathered in a Ph.D. research funded by University of Tuscia, Italy. We are grateful to the reviewers of the dissertation for the useful suggestions. We would like to thank Laura Onofri, Toni Urbani and Emanuele Blasi for their help and cooperation in the hard-working phase of data retrieval at the stores. We also thank the staff of the greengrocer, supermarket and farmers’ market involved in the survey for their willingness to support our research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics and Management, University of Tuscia, Via del Paradiso 47, 01100, Viterbo, Italy

    Clara Cicatiello, Barbara Pancino & Silvio Franco

  2. Management Studies Group, Wageningen Universiteti Social Sciences, PO box 8130, 6700EW, Wageningen, Netherlands

    Stefano Pascucci

Authors
  1. Clara Cicatiello
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  2. Barbara Pancino
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  3. Stefano Pascucci
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  4. Silvio Franco
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Clara Cicatiello.

Appendix

Appendix

The statistical elaborations presented in the paper have been carried out in a Microsoft Excel environment with the XL Stat software.

The outputs are displayed in the following tables, following the order of the results presented in the paper (Tables 4, 5, 6).

Table 4 Correlations
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Table 5 ANOVA analyses
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Table 6 Chi square analyses
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Cicatiello, C., Pancino, B., Pascucci, S. et al. Relationship Patterns in Food Purchase: Observing Social Interactions in Different Shopping Environments. J Agric Environ Ethics 28, 21–42 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10806-014-9516-9

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