Encouraging environmental sustainability through local sourcing: large buyers in the German food industry

Local sourcing and environmental sustainability gained increasing attention in the past years due to discussions about climate change. Food supply chains are responsible for climate change as well, which makes it necessary to find ways to decrease this impact. Hence, it is needed to discover if and how local sourcing can be implemented in the food industry while, at the same time, supporting the climate and environment. Therefore, this paper aims to address how local sourcing methods can support the environmental sustainability performance of large buyers in the food industry in Germany. Qualitative research was done in the form of semi-structured interviews with nine companies to gain deeper insight into their expertise. The findings indicate that local sourcing brings several advantages, for example, less packaging and waste, for the environment – if implemented and executed correctly. However, many factors must be aligned to make this happen. There is still further research required, for example, by collecting more data to generalise the findings and develop a framework for local sourcing implementation as a tool to support the environmental sustainability performance of a company.