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Nutrition insecurity among urban poor in modernizing Asian metropolises is a critical issue. It is well recognized that in urban Asia the poor are food insecure. Across Asia the food retail environment is transforming rapidly, in which supermarkets increasingly replace traditional food vending, like markets and street vendors that the urban poor depend upon. The question is, how these transformations impact the diets of the urban poor? What drives their food choice? What are their daily shopping practices and how does that affect their dietary intake? To investigate this, we developed across-disciplinary nutrition and social practices study with a sequential quantitative-qualitative mixed-method design.

Amid rapidly transforming urban food environments, Asia’s cities are faced with the dilemma of ensuring food and nutrition security for their populations while also combatting food-safety concerns.The current food environment in Hanoi, Viet Nam, only provides a minimal level of diet quality for the urban poor. Modernization policies aim to improve food safety by promoting the closure of open-air markets in favour of supermarkets and convenience stores. Traditional open-air markets are the urban population’s main source of food and ensure a healthy diet, but they do not offer formal food-safety guarantees. In contrast, modern retail outlets, such as supermarkets and convenience stores, provide foods with safety guarantees, but are not utilized by the urban poor for myriad reasons, including cultural shopping preferences, habits and convenience (hours of operation, formality, cost and perceived freshness). Though designed to increase the consumption of safe foods in Hanoi, these modern outlets may also stimulate the consumption of unhealthy ultra-processed foods and reinforce food-access inequality. The continued closure of traditional open-air markets in favour of modern retail outlets may be jeopardizing the future diet quality of Hanoi’s urban poor. We recommend that food-safety policies embrace the existing diversity of local food retail systems and identify opportunities to improve food safety at open-air fresh food markets.

Proceedings of Annual AESOP congress 10-14 Juli 2018, Gothenburg

This thesis analyses how people during everyday life confront real food safety risks that are difficult to influence and come to grips with and focuses on food safety risks in modernizing Vietnam. Over the past 40 years Vietnam has developed from war torn country with a highly centralized planned economy ranking among the world’s most impoverished nations to a socialist-oriented market economic power house, currently ranking highest among the world’s largest growth economies. Throughout this transition Vietnam has struggled with food security in which concerns have shifted from ‘is there enough to eat?’ to ‘is it safe to eat?’. Food safety has become a major social and political issue in Vietnam. Urbanization puts pressure on the provision of daily fresh food. The distanciation of production-consumption relationships and the intensification of cultivation methods, as a response to growing urban demand with a declining farmland acreage, results in regular food safety incidents related to the inappropriate use of chemicals in agricultural production. The wide media coverage of such incidences has resulted in food safety being the ‘number one consumer concern’ in Vietnam. To improve food safety and to restore trust among consumers, authorities in Vietnam, as in other parts of Asia, promulgate policies that focus on the modernization of the food retail system. Western models of consumption and retailing strongly influence these retail modernization policies, placing supermarket development at the core of strategies. The retail modernization policies are designed to influence choices and persuade consumers to change their behavior based on the idea that consumers make rational choices, assuming that food safety concerns will drive consumers into supermarket channels. However, despite consumer food safety concerns, in the performance of everyday life, consumers don’t ‘en masse’ adopt the policy enabled risk-reducing alternative of supermarkets. Traditional channels such as wet markets continue to dominate in the daily fresh vegetable purchasing practices. This phenomenon is observed across the Asian continent. As it turns out, transitions in the food buying practices of Asian consumers are not so easily established. This thesis addresses consumption as a social practice. The application of social practice based approaches to the analysis of consumption started around the turn of the century and has since gained importance in thinking about food system changes with a strong focus on western developed societies. By applying the research on the specific case of shopping for vegetables in Vietnam, this thesis exemplifies how a social practices approach is relevant beyond OECD countries. In studying the relation and dynamics between local cultural tradition and advanced globalization at the consumption junction, this thesis uncovers how practices of shopping for vegetables and their inherent food safety dynamics emerge, evolve, or die out within the rapidly transforming urban context of Hanoi, Vietnam. This thesis is concerned with the question: How do ordinary people in Vietnam confront food safety risks and why and how they do, or do not adopt alternative practices, like modern retail shopping, to respond to their increasing concerns about the fresh-food made available to them? The conducted research and its findings are described in this thesis over six chapters. It starts with an introductory chapter 1, followed by four distinct, though coherent, empirical research chapters (chapter 2-5). Each of these chapters delivers a complementary understanding on the everyday practice of shopping for vegetables in the transformative context of Vietnam. Combined these empirical research chapters provide an understanding of how practices of shopping for vegetables develop, are sustained and/or die out within a rapidly transforming urban context. The thesis ends with a concluding chapter 6. The first chapter describes the research problem, the theoretical framing of the problem and the research questions. The chapter explicates why this thesis takes a social practices theory based research approach. Exploring the middle ground of two interlinked debates - a debate with extreme positions in retail development and a debate on how to bring about behavioral change, - it is discussed that a social practices approach is relevant for obtaining understandings of everyday life, because of its non-individualist perspective, its empirical focus on habitual activity, and its inclusion of the local context. Next, the chapter outlines the conceptual approach in which relations between provision systems on the one hand and consumers on the other are mediated at the food retailing sites. By giving primacy to neither agency nor structure, it is discussed how practices based research, might deliver an understanding of the relation and dynamics between local cultural tradition and advanced globalisation. It than elaborates on the novel programmatic methodological approach of shifting perspectives - zooming in on situated practices and zooming out through a historical mapping of a portfolio of embedded practices - that allow the detection of the dynamics in situated habitual and contextually constrained activities, as well as longer term transformations of practices over time. Chapter 1 concludes with an exposition of the mix of methods applied. Chapter 2 investigates which characteristics of the dominant and persistent practice of shopping at wet markets account for its continued reproduction and addresses the question of how food safety concerns are confronted within this well–established practice. Taking a rural city not yet touched by retail modernization as the research setting, this chapter presents in-depth empirical research insights on interactions at wet-market from the perspective of both sales persons and citizen-consumers. This chapter shows that food safety is a well-recognized dilemma by both providers and consumers of vegetables, but that food safety concerns are not the principal factor in determining the purchasing practices. Shopping at wet markets is a highly routinized taken for granted activity and food safety concerns only become prominent within this habitual shopping setting. Deploying specific heuristics for vendor and product selection, food safety is shown to be continuously reproduced along pre-given lines. As long as the existing, ‘practical’ repertoire of food safety heuristics deployed by consumers suffices in counter balancing their anxieties, consumers adhere to their established food shopping routines of shopping at wet markets. Chapter 3 explores the persistence of shopping for vegetables at informal, uncontrolled, and unhygienic street markets in the context of advancing retail modernization in urban Hanoi. Government induced policies aim at replacing wet markets by supermarkets and therewith enforce breaks with well-established routines. However, although supermarkets are recognized and valued as safe vegetable retailing sites, they are only marginally successful in attracting daily vegetables consumers. This chapter addresses the question of what context specific processes and circumstances account for the continued reproduction of shopping at street markets that do not offer formal food safety guarantees. The empirical study of vegetable shopping practices at six different street markets, reveals how consumers handle food safety concerns in combination with other choices about where and when to buy. It shows how and why daily routines are time-spatial constrained. Where and how to buy vegetables is importantly shaped by other activities in daily life. The empirical research illustrates that temporal and spatial dimensions of practices in contemporary daily life in Hanoi constitute a reinforcing mechanism for the persistence of uncontrolled and unhygienic street markets, rather than the uptake of supermarkets. This chapter points out that food safety policies and interventions that do not take into consideration the existing everyday consumption practices, might fail to address acute food safety issues. Chapter 4 assesses the extent of the outreach of modernized retail formats in terms of who benefits, who is excluded and what context specific processes and circumstances influence the uptake of modified or modern retail formats by different social groups. A practice realist perspective is demonstrated to be relevant for addressing outreach and social inclusion and understanding how policy interventions play out in practice. On the basis of a collective case study of six distinct policy induced retail modernization interventions, this chapter illustrates the emerging and on-going process of food retail transformation. This approach exposes how and why similar supermarket interventions can yield contrasting intermediate outcomes when they do not accommodate for differences in shopper population and do not adapt to variations in the urban conditions. The current one-dimensional, supermarket oriented, retail modernization policy that aims to reduce the exposure to uncertified ‘unsafe’ food, is shown to lead to the exclusion of a large proportion of the population. This chapter points out the importance for Vietnamese policymakers to consider the risk of social deprivation and to explicitly reflect on the unanticipated consequences of the normative direction of their interventions in food provision. This chapter indicates that reaching a more diverse population requires more flexible policies that allow for malleability in response to local conditions. Chapter 5 addresses the questions: what practices of purchasing or appropriating fresh vegetables do exist in contemporary Vietnam; how do they relate to food safety concerns and dynamics; why did they emerge and evolve during the past 40 years; and what factors are important in explaining the dynamics of change in the overall set of shopping practices? Deploying a practice historical perspective, this chapter unravels the complex evolving relationships between the local and the global as they can be read from the ways in which Vietnamese consumers deal with food safety risks when shopping for fresh food, by analyzing a portfolio of shopping practices against the background of historical changes over the period 1975-2015. Discussing the way in which six situated social practices are embedded in the broader set of food appropriation practices, this chapter portrays how practices show consistency in change over time, influenced by transformations in their environment, in which practices are interrelated with other practices in daily life beyond the act of shopping for food and beyond the domain of food. Further this chapter demonstrates how food safety related trust mechanisms as deployed by Vietnamese consumers show patterns of hybridization of personalized trust with abstract guidance systems. The historical approach provides insights on why shopping at supermarkets is not just currently still limited in recruiting practitioners. Also looking forward, it is not reasonable to expect homogenization in food retail system transformation. This thesis concludes with chapter 6 which addresses the question of what lessons can be learned from social practices research in assessing the present and future role of supermarkets and the accompanying food safety strategies, which imply the de- and re-routinization of well-established contemporary practices of shopping for fresh-food. Along the four empirical research chapters, it first sets out to answer the research questions. Next it elaborates on the theoretical and methodological approach. The chapter describes the iterative research process and depicts how methodological variance can be used as a strength when applied as an intelligible program of shifting perspectives - zooming in and out on practices - and a mix of methods. It is pointed out that although practices based approaches are criticized on their complexity and ambiguity, the approach used in this thesis is proven to deliver concrete results and might be useful in similar cases. Lastly, this concluding chapter discusses how practices based perspectives have the potential to inform a more versatile and amenable portfolio of public regulations and resources when striving for amelioration in food provision, not only in Vietnam, but across the Asian continent. This thesis demonstrates how changes in infrastructures are not sufficient for changing practices and thus warns against making food safety policies strongly dependent on a single supermarket model. Instead of putting all strategic resources on one strategy, efforts of integration and mutual adaptation of modern and traditional structures could be considered. Pursuing a trend of hybridization prevents that consumers have to break with long established routines in an isolated, radical way.

Food safety is a widely recognized concern in Vietnam. Public officials, companies and consumers find different ways to address risks of pesticide residues and bacterial contamination related to the use of fresh vegetables in daily diets. The response of the government to these food safety risks includes the modernization and regulation of the food retail system. However, reforms that aim to offer a controlled and predictable provision of fresh vegetables through supermarkets seem to contrast with the daily consumer practices in a dynamic city as Hanoi; over 95% of vegetables is still being purchased at long-established open-air markets, importantly the informal and unhygienic street markets. Using a practices theory approach, this paper aims to explain this persistence of street-market shopping for vegetables. Detailed accounts of consumer practices, case studies at different retailing sites and daily logbooks of consumers demonstrate that the way consumers cope with food safety risks is largely shaped by the temporal and spatial constraints of their daily shopping practices. We identified how vegetable shopping is either enjoyed as social interaction within the local community or is regarded a time-consuming activity that conflicts with other activities in everyday life. Our findings indicate how these constraints constitute a reinforcing mechanism for the persistence of uncontrolled and unhygienic street markets. To make policy responses to food safety risks both more realistic and effective, it is essential to connect to and accommodate the daily realities of consumers managing time and space in a modernizing city rather than to impose an ideal, typical market exclusively driven by the wish to control food safety risks.

Rapid economic development, urbanisation and rising income levels, in Vietnam offer potential for pro-poor development, by creating new market opportunities for producers, traders and retailers. This article describes the process of value chain development, which involves all actors in the broad chain of avocado

In-store consumentenonderzoek naar de perceptie van prijs en meerwaarde van biologische producten ten opzichte van gangbare producten onder wekelijkse kopers en incidentele kopers van biologische producten en kopers van gangbare voedingsmiddelen. Het onderzoek is uitgevoerd in tien plaatsen in Nederland waar, in het kader van het Prijsexperiment biologische producten, de prijs van biologische producten gedurende een periode van vier maanden is verlaagd

Het biologische marktsegment is vanwege de hogere kostprijs van het geteelde product een natuurlijke kraamkamer voor productinnovatie. De zoektocht naar tastbaar onderscheid en aansprekende verkoopconcepten vereist multidisciplinaire samenwerking van teelt- en marktonderzoek. LEI en PPO Glastuinbouw werken momenteel mee aan vier projecten, waarvan één in de sierteelt

Opzet van het onderzoek Van eind april tot eind augustus 2006 is in tien plaatsen in Nederland een experiment uitgevoerd waarbij supermarkten de prijzen van acht biologische productgroepen sterk hebben verlaagd. Het doel van dit experiment was om na te gaan of bij een permanent lagere prijs consumenten meer biologische producten gaan kopen. Er is ook aan consumenten gevraagd waarom ze bepaalde producten kopen en welke ideeën zij hebben over meerwaarde en prijs van biologische producten. Zowel kopers als niet-kopers van biologische producten zijn ondervraagd. Tijdens het experiment zijn voor de biologische variant van eieren, melk, aardappelen, rijst en muesli de prijzen verlaagd met 5 tot 25% (verschillend per plaats in schijven van 5%). Voor de biologische variant van varkensvlees, rundergehakt en champignons is een prijsverlaging doorgevoerd van 8 tot 40% (in schijven van 8%). Per plaats in Nederland was de korting per productgroep in alle supermarkten gelijk om de onderlinge concurrentiepositie niet te beïnvloeden. Aan het experiment hebben elf supermarktformules meegewerkt: Albert Heijn, C1000, Coop, Coop Compact, Edah, Hoogvliet, Jan Linders, Jumbo, Konmar, Plus en Super de Boer. Zij hebben wekelijkse verkoopdata ter beschikking gesteld over de periode 2005 tot en met het eind van het experiment. Daarnaast hebben ze toestemming gegeven om hun klanten, in de winkel direct na aankoop, te enquêteren. Het onderzoek is opgezet en gefi nancierd door het Ministerie van Landbouw, Natuur en Voedselkwaliteit met medewerking van andere partijen uit het Convenant Biologische Marktontwikkeling. Voor de kwaliteitsbewaking is een begeleidingscommissie van deskundigen ingesteld.

Deze factsheet hoort bij het project ‘Nieuwe biologische ketenconcepten’, gericht op de ontwikkeling van nieuwe producten en innovatieve product-markt combinaties voor opschaling van de biologische landbouw. De factsheet is een samenvatting van deuitgebreide rapportage ‘Bio-Logisch?! In the eye of the beholder’. De verwerkte informatie is het resultaat van een uitgebreide deskresearch studie die door onderzoekers van het LEI en PPO in 2005 is uitgevoerd.

"Om succesvol in de biologische markt te opereren is het essentieel de potentiële eindconsument nauwlettend in het oog te houden. Maar wat weten we eigenlijk van de biologische consument? Over wie hebben we het dan, wat beweegt deze consument en wat zijn zijn behoeften? Kunnen we een groep identificeren waar duidelijk marktkansen liggen? Waarom lukt het momenteel niet om de biologische afzet te vergroten bij die groep? Welke factoren spelen daarin en in welke mate een rol? Deze studie maakt onderdeel uit van het project ""Nieuwe biologische ketenconcepten"" gericht op het ontwikkelen van nieuwe produkten en innovatieve product-markt combinaties ten behoeve van een verdere opschaling van de biologische landbouw binnen programma 400-II. Deze publicatie heeft een tweeledig doel. Allereerst beoogt de publicatie een overzicht te verstrekken van de huidige kennis over de consument en de mogelijke redenen waarom al dan niet tot de aankoop van biologische producten wordt overgegaan. Daarenboven wordt getracht aanknopingspunten aan te geven waar mogelijke kansen liggen voor de afzet van biologische producten. Dit alles aan de hannd van aansprekende praktijkvoorbeelden, internationale benchmarks en de meest recente ontwikkelingen."

Het AKK project Twee Weten Meer Dan Een wil de belangrijkste kennisthema’s en bijbehorende doelgroepen in biologische afzetketens identificeren en nagaan welke kennisverspreidingsactiviteiten, zowel binnen de projecten als binnen de biologische keten het meeste effect hebben. Behoefte en interesse vanuit de biologische sector voor de onderwerpen moet hierin centraal staan. In een eerste behoeftepeiling is met deskresearch en bij projectparticipanten, belangenbehartigers en bedrijven uit de biologische keten de kennisbehoefte geïnventariseerd. Welke kennis is anno 2003/2004 interessant en belangrijk, welke thema’s achten zij actueel voor de biologische keten en hoe vergaren ze bij voorkeur deze kennis? Deze behoeftepeiling heeft drie centrale thema’s geïdentificeerd: 1. Thema Consument: Meerwaarde biologisch en consumentenbehoeften (hoe aansluiting te vinden bij de behoeften van consumenten en aan te spreken op het moment van aankoop): communicatie in de keten! 2. Thema Kwaliteit: Ketenbeheersing van Kwaliteit 3. Thema Samenwerking: Proceskennis voor samenwerking in de keten

Versafdelingen zijn van vitaal belang voor de retail. Toch hebben versmerken tot nu toe maar moeilijk een positie in het retailkanaal kunnen opbouwen. Er zijn vrijwel geen A-merken in vers. Tijdens het tweede congres Merkbaar Vers stonden de opties voor versmerken in het retailkanaal centraal.

Het belang en nut van merken voor de land- en tuinbouw stond centraal op 13 juni jl. tijdens het congres Merkbaar Vers. De verwachting is dat over 10 jaar de meeste groente- en fruitsoorten een merknaam zullen dragen.

Even in a less eventful year, it’s no easy feat: working to make our food supply healthy and sustainable. But 2020 brought a spate of new challenges. It was the year of Brexit, Black Lives Matter, and the COVID-19 pandemic. A year of hope and loss and solidarity, of masks and worries and Zoom calls. Of infection sweeping through the meatpacking industry and sometimes, of empty supermarket shelves. It was also the year that brought us the glimmering realisation that everything could be different. When so much has changed – how we work, who we spend time with, how far we venture from home – what all might be possible for food and for farming? In Flevo Campus’s latest collection of essays, thirteen journalists, scholars, and thought leaders from the US, the Netherlands, and the UK share insight into the question: How can we build resilience into our food supply – and grow more resilient ourselves? Every year, Flevo Campus publishes the best work on feeding the cities of today and tomorrow. This year’s edition includes essays by Stephen Satterfield, Charles C. Mann, Herman Lelieveldt, Hester Dibbits, Kelly Streekstra, Sigrid Wertheim-Heck, Anke Brons, Joris Lohman, Sebastiaan Aalst, Marian Stuiver, Frank Verhoeven, Emily Whyman, and Lenno Munnikes.

Overal ter wereld zien we dat steden steeds meer het voortouw nemen in de voedsel systeem transitie vanuit verantwoordelijkheden als weerbaarheid, gezondheid en duurzaamheid. Dit drijft ook de herbezinning op regionale voedselsystemen, city-region-food-systems, maar wat betekent dat voor de opgave om stedelingen duurzaam van gezond en veilig voedsel te voorzien met in acht neming van de toenemende diversiteit in de stedelijke samenstelling? Wat betekent dat voor de gewenste omslag in het nabijgelegen agro-food producerende land, welke dilemma’s en welke kansen zijn er? Wat weten we in dat verband van de relatie tussen de agrarische sector en de steden in Flevoland?

Almere en Zeewolde zijn beide gelegen in de provincie Flevoland, een provincie gecreëerd door landaanwinning uit de zee en bestemd voor landbouwproductie. De geografische verbondenheid binnen de Zuidelijke Flevopolder is aanleiding om deze twee gemeentes in deze studie tezamen op te pakken. De nadruk in dit rapport ligt op de urbane gemeente Almere, waarbij de aanpalende meer rurale gemeente Zeewolde als peri-urbaan voedsel- en grondstofproducerend gebied wordt meegenomen.