Food Communication of Food Industry Corporations in the Context of Sustainability

Abstract

The starting point of the following study is that a narrow understanding of corporate food communication, as a nutritional-centred topic of marketing or corporate health management, is not sufficient to capture different roles and functions of food communication in the context of sustainability. In the context of corporate responsibility for sustainable development, food communication provides additional functions besides increasing sales and promoting the health of employees. These various roles and functions of corporate food communication identified by a qualitative comparative case study with two German food corporations are presented. The results demonstrate that corporate food communication is more thematically comprehensive and also addresses actors in the non-economic environment, for example political actors. The study results indicate that a socially-oriented perspective as an extension to a reductive conception of food communication is more promising in showing the diversity of food communication in society.

Keywords: food communication, corporations, corporate social responsibility, sustainability, qualitative research, food system