Configuring ethical food consumers
Understanding the Failures of Digital Food Platforms
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2181971 |
|---|---|
| Authors | C Fuentes (0000-0001-6687-274X, Lund University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 18 |
| Issue | 6 |
| Pages | 1-19 |
| Publication date | 2025-11-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Cultural Economy (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1753-0350 • E-ISSN: 1753-0369 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/17530350.2024.2336465 |
| OpenAlex | W4396905721 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 45 |
Digital food platforms are being launched, offering consumers convenient access to 'ethical' food. Ensuring the viability of these platforms hinges on attracting and retaining loyal customers. However, recent studies show that despite considerable efforts from market actors, stable platformconsumer relationships are rare in these digitalized food markets. The aim of this paper is to explore and explain why digital food platforms fail to produce stable ethical consumers. The paper draws on an ethnographically inspired study of the meal box market to explore the socio-material configuring of consumers and the resulting consumer arrangements. The analysis shows that while the market devices of meal box providers worked to produce loyal and ethical food consumers, the consumers in this study were not loyal to any one meal box provider. This instability, the paper argues, was the result of both a restless market and restless households. The multiple, often conflicting, and, in some cases, unspecific consumer configurations intensified the households' dynamic tendencies, leading to changes in diets and sustainability focus, the breaking of routines, and the continuous chasing of offers. Because of this, the consumer arrangements formed tended to unravel over time, making the production of stable ethical food consumers difficult
Advertising · Business · Commerce · Food packaging · Food Waste Reduction and Sustainability · Organic Food and Agriculture · Service and Product Innovation · Food Science · Marketing
Shaping technology/building society
Materialized Gender
Calculation, qualculation, calqulation
Ethical Consumption Communities Across Physical and Digital Spaces
Ethnographic Interview
Is the Modern Consumer a Buridan’s Donkey? Product Packaging and Consumer Choice
Digitalizing Consumption
Research Methods in Digital Food Studies
Reassembling the Social
Devising food consumption
Configuring users of cholesterol lowering foods
Risk Stories in the Media
Product, Competence, Project and Practice
The walkthrough method
Configuring the Digital City of Amsterdam
Reconfiguring the User
Meal box schemes a convenient way to avoid convenience food? Uses and understandings of meal box schemes among Danish consumers
Consuming Ethics
Devising Consumption
Assembling nostalgia
Configuring the Child Player
Configuring the User as Everybody
An Introduction to Market Devices
A Brief Theory of the 'Captation' of Publics
Beyond the Throwaway Society
Creating the Responsible Consumer
Ethical consumption applications as failed market innovations
Devising the consumer of the competitive electricity market
Representing the political consumer
Agencing ethical consumers
Agencing practices
Technologies of ironic revelation
Market practices and over-consumption
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |