Week 5 Paper EGBE

Ethical Consumption

The behavior of ethically minded consumers who feel accountable for the environment and towards society. It is viewed from a consumer empowerment perspective and broadly encompasses various phenomena from Fair Trade to general environmental and labor concerns. A key challenge in this area is the attitude-behavior gap.

Attitude-Behavior Gap (Ethical Purchasing Gap)

The discrepancy between a declared ethical attitude and actual behavior in ethical consumption. This gap can be attributed to the vagueness of the "ethical" product concept (e.g., product safety, environmental impacts, fair pricing), lack of information, and limited product availability. The situational context, encompassing both physical and social surroundings, is identified as a crucial mediator of this gap.

Eataly

An Italian retailer that launched in 2007, founded by Oscar Farinetti, offering a new food distribution model focused on sustainability, sharing, and responsibility. It combines sales of raw food with restaurants and training, and aims to be a cultural intermediary that educates consumers on ethical food practices. Eataly sought to bring "ethical" food from a niche market to the mainstream and serves as a successful case study of collaboration between a company and a social movement (Slow Food) to co-design a new, ethically oriented business model.

Slow Food

A worldwide organization founded in Italy in 1989 to counteract fast food and promote 'good, clean, and fair' food. Its objectives include taste education, connecting producers and consumers of ethical foods, and building communities of ethical food supporters. Slow Food was instrumental in influencing Eataly’s founding ideas and actively supported the company in supplier selection and defining communication, acting as a certification agency for Eataly's ethical commitment. It promotes the concept of "eco-gastronomy".

Eco-gastronomy

A concept promoted by the Slow Food movement that highlights the ethical and political meaning of food, along with emphasizing pleasure in consumption.

Good, Clean, and Fair Food

The Slow Food movement's empirical definition of "ethical" products. "Good" refers to taste and quality, "Clean" implies respect for raw materials and transparent, traditional production processes (ecological sustainability), and "Fair" means ensuring adequate margins for producers and affordable prices for customers (social sustainability).

Transformative Social Alliance

A new form of collaboration between social movements and companies, distinct from traditional (ex-post) alliances, as seen in the Slow Food and Eataly partnership. It is characterized by an explicit and shared aim of market transformation prior to the development of a new venture, with the new venture being an expected outcome of this collaboration.