Business Ethics Responsibility

Introduction

As per the observations of Aschemann-Witzel, de Hooge and Normann (2016), the critical implications of ethical, responsible and sustainable practices within the food retailing industry at both the United Kingdom and on the global scale could be comprehended from dual perspectives. The initial one is the consistent and expansive growth in the awareness of consumers of the retail food sectors regarding the impact of the activities of food retail corporate organisations have on both the society and the environment in general. There has not been any exemption in terms of either the sizes of the food retailing corporate organisations or the specific segments of food retail business in which these organisations could be operating. In this context, the corresponding research study would be undertaking detailed examination and discussion about the significant challenges which the food industrial retailers have to contend with in maintaining ethical, responsible and sustainable practices both at the corporate and social levels. The study would be further delving into the evaluation of the predominant perceptions of business operational ethics which are currently in utilisation by the leading food industrial firms through the previous 5 years. This would entail the assessment of the actions and impacts of such concurrent actions on the norms and behaviours of such organisations including the actions, procedural processes and work methodical cultural perceptions.

Furthermore, the research would be concentrating upon the analysis of the measures through which the food retailing companies are attempting to develop and introduce corporate social responsibility practices to effectively compete with and differentiate them from their market competitors. Finally, the research study would come to the conclusive stage through the formulation of multiplicity of recommendations to highlight the avenues of progression in the future operational context to ensure sustainable and socially responsible corporate practices within the greater global deliberations.

Section A

According to Blok et al (2017), the overarching factor of public opinion is the primary source of influence on the entire food industry, including the food retail sectors at both the United Kingdom and at the global sectors. The apparent vulnerability and sensitivity of the food retail business towards such a factor could be considered to be the most effective source of incentivisation for the business groups operating in this sector to develop and then implement certain operational policies. These policies are mostly comprised by the social, ethical and responsible measure towards the maintenance of the interests of the food retail stakeholders as well as the sustaining utilisation of natural resources gained from the environment. The ethical, responsible and sustaining organisational perceptions could, thus, as has been analysed by Bonn, Cronin Jr and Cho (2016), be necessary to be utilised as the corner stones of the organisational operational procedures on the basis of which the entire concept of the corporate social responsibility could be formulated. According to Chkanikova and Mont (2015), this has been a forceful business concept within the entire food retailing business community as well as in the academic research processes which have permeated such business sectors. The ethical, responsible and sustainable practices adopted by the various food retailing organisations in the current market situations have been indicative of the coverage of an entire sequence of disparate activities and these involve the fulfilment of multifaceted operational initiatives including the purchase of green products and recycling the food waste material. According to Dabic et al (2016), the implications of the ethical, responsible and sustainable practices adopted by the leading food retailers globally could, in turn, overlap with the organisational administrative discourses such as the performance of sustainable corporate governance. Freidberg (2017) has enumerated this perspective in an extraneous manner to outline two different strands of implications of this singular process of ERS manageability. These are the variables of the relationship between corporate sustainability and sustainable management and the individual process of cognition demonstrated by the customers and consumers of the retail food products. These forms of implications have emerged over the years in a gradual manner in tandem with the general consumer awareness enhancement.

As per the research observations of Frenkel, Mamic and Greene (2016) the process of cognitive preference, on part of the consumers of the food industry, has produced an interesting impact on the general functionality of the leading food retail corporate organisations, including the processed and agro-food operators. This impact has been outlined by Hillier, Comfort and Jones (2017), in the manner of the multiplicity of steps which the leading food retailing firms have undertaken to develop better understanding of the decisional pathway of the consumers so as to better align their organisational aims and products to suit the objectives which could be gained through the emulation of such a decision pathway. The important ethical views which the organisations are currently utilising in this context are as the following:

: Recognition of the necessities of consumers. This involves the comprehension of consumer awareness level realisation and evaluation of the interest of consumers in the ERS activities as a direct supplement to the product attributes. 2: Conducting the research processes involving information gathering on the consumer perception development trends to better suit the marketing policies and procedures of ERS practice projection on the global scale of the market. 3: Development and evaluation of certain alternative strategies in this context by the leading food retailing firms. 4: Purchase process inclination towards food products which could have been apparently sourced from environmentally friendly resources. 5: Evaluation of the post-purchase experiences exhibited by the consumers in terms of the food products which could have been either sourced through environmentally friendly methods or could have been conventionally manufactured or procured. This is vital to outline the variegated influences which the proper ERS practices could impart on the decision formulation procedures of the consumers regarding their purchasing behaviour. 6:Maintaining the proper measure of safety and quality of the sourced food products under the prospects of ethical and responsible practices. 7: Management of the supply chain through the procedures such as supplier verification programs and compliance management. 8: Management of the initiatives involving business social compliance.

According to Hughes (2015), one of the most significant challenges which leading food retailing organisations could experience is the complication regarding synchronising the ERS principles with those of the social ratings of the companies. This is directly influenced by the functioning of the environmental and social rating agencies which contribute to the effectiveness of the food retailing firms regarding the management of transparency in their efforts to implement ERS procedures and plans. Jacob-John (2018) has enumerated this predicament in the manner of the overarching effect of social ratings in convincing the social investors regarding the organisational investments in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programs by the companies under consideration. The emphasis is always on the provisioning of accurate information to enhance the transparency surrounding the ERS and CSR functioning of the organisations. Here lies the first challenge for any business organisation to properly manage the social ratings generated by different institutions. The primary causality of such a problem is that transparency regarding the process of development and calculation of such ratings is inherently non-existent. The same problem persists concerning the calculations and considerations of the variables which differentiate the rating scores of different food retailing organisations. In this context, the names of two different social ratings calculating agencies could be considered to be significant as far as accuracy and dearth of transparency could be concerned. According to Jones et al (2017) these two are the Sustainable Investment Research International (SiRi) and the Kinder, Lydenberg and Domini Research & Analytics (KLD). According to Jones, Comfort and Hillier (2016), SiRi is to be consortium of ten different research organisations which operate in the discipline of social investment research and these research institutions are based throughout Australia, Europe and North America. This consortium is considered to be the largest independent research consortium which provides the differential services concerning sustainable investment research and calculations and the recipients of such services are the institutional investors as well as financial operatives and professionals. According to Jones, Comfort and Hillier (2017), KLD develops and publishes a Broad Market Social Index which influences the investment funding business to a great extent on the basis of this index being the oldest and one of the most trustworthy in the global financial and investment market. Such social and investment rating institutions wield extensive influence on the overall ERS functioning by even the most leading food retailing organisations such as the Coca-Cola company. This food and beverages company suffered profound negative reactions from the entire range of investors and financiers when the index developed by both the KLD and SiRi, in 2006, downgraded the ratings of the company mentioned highlighting the managerial decisions of the Coca-Cola group regarding the problems in managing disparate labour forces and shortcomings in the properly implementing environmental sustainability principles in their organisational functionalities.

According to Kim and Ham (2016), the utilisation of ERS in food distribution processes and chains has been considerably by the environmentalist pressures. Such pressure and the resultant influence have led the food retailing organisations to undertake concerted efforts in the improvement of their images concerning sustainable and ethical as well as environmentally responsible functioning in their business processes. Such ERS and environmentally sustainable functioning involve initiatives such as promotion of sustainable agricultural practices and creation of various standardisation yardsticks concerning animal husbandry and farming as well as recycling of storage products through launching of various composite programs. According to Lehner (2015), one such considerations regarding fostering of ethical behavioural actions has been the decision to avoid the practice to provide the customer complementary polymer bags as carriage of their purchased food products from the retailer shops and substitute such plastic components with recycled materials, such as paper, which could be reused on multiple of occasions. As per the observations of Lehtinen (2017), such undertakings could lead to the serving of dual purposes. The initial one could be that greater cost efficient production could be performed since the recyclable material could be utilised consistently and degradation of such elements would not be imposing greater production or purchase costs on the food retailing company since the same product could be utilised repeatedly. The second one would be the obvious improvement in the social ratings through enhancement of the corporate social sustainability reputation. The first improvement would be an internal one and the second would benefit the company undertaking such an ethical environmental sustainability practice in an external manner.

Section B

Furthermore, according to Lever and Evans (2017), it is always significant to outline the extent to which organisational and private intentions and motives could prevail against socially exigent objectives regarding the ERS mechanism implementation. Thus, according to Lindgreen et al (2016), it has been a long term practice of different scholars and researchers to attempt to ascertain the various extents and nature of the corporate activities regarding the ethical and sustainable practices through auditing the functioning data base of such food retailing companies. This form of research generally involves the conductance of in-depth qualitative data collection in the form of personal and direct interviews with the most important and key decision making personalities associated with the working architecture of the food retailers including the confectionery retail industry. As has been researched by Manning (2015), there could be determined three specific motivating factors which influence the ethical responsive and sustainable practices within any food retail organisation. These could be recognised as the customer relationship management optimisation, maximisation of profitability and gaining of the most extensive space from the business manoeuvring perspectives within the food retail trading sectors. As per the suggestions of Naidoo and Gasparatos (2018), the considerations of formulating a positive image of the organisations from the perspective of corporate social responsibility have always been of the secondary nature since philanthropic considerations existed only in minor intensity within the overall structural functioning of the food retailing companies.

As has been outlined by Müller and Stölzle (2016), the food and beverage trading retailer PepsiCo generally presents the strategy of ethical responsibility management and the sustainability measures through the formulation of definite business objectives and goals during the meeting of shareholders annually. The identification and disclosure of different factors and targets comprising the strategic considerations in this regard could be identified as climate changes, scarcity of water and issues highlighting the problems of public health maintenance in the greater agenda of the food retailer under consideration. The company has so far specified such factors to be the core challenges in terms of ensuring sustainability during financial filings held at a per annum basis. These considerations are also indicative of the overall alignment of the functionality of PepsiCo towards greater stakeholder engagement.

Next, as per the stipulations of Packer et al (2019), the food and soft drinks retail giant Coca-Cola has also been undertaking efforts to improve the efficacy of utilisation of water while undertaking of the soft drink manufacturing responsibilities. According to Ross Pandey and Ross (2015), the company under consideration has managed to improve judicious water efficiency utilisation by 20% as well as the company has also managed to identify the necessity of utilisation of third party based rigorous evaluation involving the water utilisation and management approach. This, from a functional point of view, could be understood as water stewardship approach.

According to Simões and Sebastiani (2017), the coffee retailer giant Starbuck’s has been also undertaking the utilisation of ERS mechanisms within the functioning policies of the company. During the annual shareholders meeting during the financial year 2016-17, as has been delineated by Souza-Monteiro and Hooker (2017), the retailer under consideration had outlined the efforts invested by the company to engage with all of the members of the local communities as well as with the suppliers. This could be comprehended as engaging in effective dialogue with the investors. This also involved the acceleration of investment in environmentally sustainable forms of firming to reach the objective of Starbuck’s to obtain 100% of ethical sourcing of the necessary coffee beans for the products of the company till the year 2020.

On the other hand, the food retailer General Mills, as per the observations of Terlau and Hirsch (2015), had released an entire set of commitments involving sustainable sourcing objectives and this involved the implementation of the most robust process of risk assessment in tandem with third party based partnerships. Such an approach culminated in the prioritisation of ten different commodities of food which included wheat, corn, oats and others which the company specified to be sourced from sustainable firming practices. Furthermore, Topp-Becker and Ellis (2017) have observed that the second largest chain of food distribution retailer globally, the company of Carrefour, has been imparting special emphasis on the protection of resources for sustainable utilisation of the same. This definite approach towards ERS implementation has been augmented with the initiatives such as management and recycling of waste material, promotion of responsible consumption and corporate social responsibility practices. The food retailer also imparts particular attention on the ethical practices and prioritises the purchase of food products and raw materials from the local production centres and local farmers who could be utilising sustainable and environmentally friendly farming methods. Thus, continuous improvement methods are also supported by the organisation under consideration. The company has also rewarded the product suppliers who had been able to maintain the greatest measure of commitment towards sustainability. A per the research of Freidberg (2017), one of the most excellent examples of an effective ERS systems administration application could be outlined from the case of the local food retailer of Turkey, named Migros. Frenkel Mamic and Greene (2016), have identified the core values of this organisation as transparency, responsibility, accountability and fairness of practices.

Section C

As per the considerations of Hillier, Comfort and Jones (2017), the recommendations for the food retailing organisations to sustain their growth and ensure responsibility in the concerned sector could be multifarious in nature and extent. The most significant of these have been described as the following: 1: Incremental emphasis on the initiatives of local sourcing would have to be instituted. The successful application of such initiatives could effectively reduce the distance which the food products would require to be travelled and this would as well assist the food retailing leading organisations to support the local farmers and independent food producers. This could be especially effective in terms of grocery retail market. One instance of this could be drawn from the efforts of Sainsbury’s of UK to undertake the sales of products which are completely locally delivered and such products involve the sustenance such as poultry, fish, eggs, meet and milk as well as tomatoes and apples along with various other vegetables. The endeavour has been a marked success. 2: Enhancement of the efficiency of the distribution systems would be required. This could involve specific initiatives such as optimisation of transportation, adopting the modes of transportation which could be more friendly to the environment and thus would produce lesser measure of environmental pollution and even reutilisation of various transportation measures which could be environmentally more efficient. 3: The necessity to integration of the eco-labelling processes with those of the exploration outcomes of the opportunities regarding the locally sourced food elements. This could be effective in terms of the inclusion of the information regarding the origin of the mater

which could be put up for sales within the organic labels. This could as well point out the various aspects of the concept of “food miles” to the purchasers and consumers of the retail food products. This would be an effective ethical practice in terms of the responsibility to inform the customers regarding the origin and associated information concerning the purchased food products. 4: The product packaging of the own brands of different food retailers would have to be based on the eco-design principles. The direct benefit could be derived from this practice in the form of economic savings increment which is a hallmark of sustainable practice since eco-designing principles permit the food retailing organisations such as Tesco to incrementally reduce the size and weight of the packages in which food products are inserted. This would as well outline the best possible methods through which material efficiency and optimised logistics management could be achieved. Apart from these, the internal quality assessment audits performed by different retailing organisations would have to be effectively utilised to identify the areas of improvement along the supply chain. The outcomes of such endeavours could decide the measure to which the environmental considerations could be integrated within the existing and diversified food product specifications.

Conclusion

The preceding study has been deliberative of the academic effort to assess and evaluate the scope of ethical, sustainable and responsible practices within the working architecture of different business organisations within the overall food retail industry at the global scale. The study evaluation has been formulated on the basis of three specific segments comprising the assessment of key challenges which various food retailers could experience in the retail business discourse and the various methods of ERS application through which such challenges could be overcome, the examination and enumeration of the ethical, sustainable and responsible working practices implemented by various international and local food retailing organisations and finally, the recommendations formulation through which the future functionalities of food retailing organisations could be sustained and the ERS principles could be translated into actual practices.

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