Angela Tregear’s research while affiliated with University of Edinburgh and other places

Objective This study aims at comparing two Italian case studies in relation to school children’s plate waste and its implications, in terms of nutritional loss, economic cost, and carbon footprint. Design Plate waste was collected through an aggregate selective weighting method for 39 days. Setting Children from the first to the fifth grade from four primary schools, two in each case study (Parma and Lucca), were involved. Results With respect to the served food, in Parma the plate waste percentage was lower than in Lucca (p<0.001). Fruit and side-dishes were highly wasted, mostly in Lucca (>50%). The energy loss of the lunch meals accounted for 26% (Parma) and 36% (Lucca). Among nutrients, dietary fibre, folate and vitamin C, calcium and potassium were lost at most (26-45%). Overall, after adjusting for plate waste data, most of the lunch menus fell below the national recommendations for energy (50%, Parma; 79%, Lucca) and nutrients, particularly for fat (85%, Parma; 89%, Lucca). Plate waste was responsible for 19% (Parma) and 28% (Lucca) of the carbon footprint associated to the food supplied by the catering service, with starchy food being the most important contributor (52%, Parma; 47%, Lucca). Overall, the average cost of plate waste was 1.8 €/kg (Parma) and 2.7 €/kg (Lucca), accounting respectively for 4% and 10% of the meal full price. Conclusion A re-planning of the school meals service organisation and priorities is needed to decrease the inefficiency of the current system and reduce food waste and its negative consequences.

Increasingly, policymakers are setting ambitious goals for sustainability in public procurement, integrated across different pillars. Such ambitions are apparent in public catering services, where procurement models have been shifting towards greater localisation of supply chains and purchasing of more organically grown food. To date however, few studies have examined empirically what the impacts of different procurement models are across these multiple pillars of sustainability. This research aimed to fill the gap, by measuring and comparing the environmental, economic and nutritional outcomes of different models of school meals procurement. Case studies were undertaken of ten primary school meals services in five European countries, capturing different procurement model types. Results showed carbon emissions ranged from 0.95 kgs CO2e per meal in the lowest case to 2.41 kgs CO2e in the highest case, with adoption of low carbon food waste disposal methods and reduction of the amount of ruminant meat in the menus being the most important actions for lowering emissions. In terms of economic impact, local economic multiplier ratios ranged from 1.59 to 2.46, and although the level of local food sourcing contributed to these ratios, the effect was eclipsed, in some cases, by investment in local catering staff. Meanwhile, implementation of a robust standards regime and improving canteen environment and supervision were the most important actions for nutritional quality and intake. The paper discusses the implications of the findings for integrated, sustainable models of food procurement.

Increasingly, policymakers are setting ambitious goals for sustainability in public procurement, integrated across different pillars. Such ambitions are apparent in public catering services, where procurement models have been shifting towards greater localisation of supply chains and purchasing of more organically grown food. To date however, few studies have examined empirically what the impacts of different procurement models are across these multiple pillars of sustainability. This research aimed to fill the gap, by measuring and comparing the environmental, economic and nutritional outcomes of different models of school meals procurement. Case studies were undertaken of ten primary school meals services in five European countries, capturing different procurement model types. Results showed carbon emissions ranged from 0.95 kgs CO 2 e per meal in the lowest case to 2.41 kgs CO 2 e in the highest case, with adoption of low carbon food waste disposal methods and reduction of the amount of ruminant meat in the menus being the most important actions for lowering emissions. In terms of economic impact, local economic multiplier ratios ranged from 1.59 to 2.46, and although the level of local food sourcing contributed to these ratios, the effect was eclipsed, in some cases, by investment in local catering staff. Meanwhile, implementation of a robust standards regime and improving canteen environment and supervision were the most important actions for nutritional quality and intake. The paper discusses the implications of the findings for integrated, sustainable models of food procurement.

Background The nexus of agri-food and sustainability in economic development has recently attracted the interest of policymakers, as global challenges like climate change and food security are revisited and reassessed. The critical role of food production in economic development has been emphasized through targeted agricultural quality policies. Many developed countries worldwide, including EU member states, have introduced food quality policies that could support sustainability. Scope and approach This paper combines knowledge obtained by several groups in a broad EU study and the reflections on policy-related results by EU-stakeholders, streamlined by a Delphi analysis. Current work presents research-based policy recommendations and statements on various quality schemes, introductory inferred from expert opinions throughout Europe, gauged through a modified policy Delphi framework. Key findings and conclusions A roadmap of policy and practical proposals have been identified for all key stakeholders involved in these initiatives, implying the need to reshape the supply chain dynamics to continuously improve producers, processors, retailers, and consumers within the EU and definitively worldwide. Furthermore, implementing a holistic approach considering environmental and socio-economic features can improve the effectiveness of EU food quality policies.

Publicly-funded programmes of business support are important vehicles for rural development, and over the last two decades, group-based models of business support have become popular, in which dedicated advisors work with small firms in groups, rather than one-to-one mentoring. A fundamental goal of such programmes is to foster enhanced inter-firm knowledge exchange and learning, and improved firm resilience and innovation, through the development of collective trust amongst participants,. Although many studies have investigated the evolution of trust, including in a rural context, to date most research has focused either on the macro-institutional level, or the micro-personal level, with relatively little exploration of how meso-level collective trust may be encouraged amongst groups of participants in rural business support programmes. This paper addresses the gap by exploring the development of collective trust within two group-based rural business support programmes in Northern Ireland. The study reveals that programme design features and the interpersonal style of advisors combined to shape clients' trust in the programmes and their sponsoring institutions, as well as influencing the degrees of goodwill and camaraderie within the client groups themselves.

Purpose - This paper empirically examines the direct and indirect effects of perceived termination severity on customers’ behavioral reactions via betrayal and justice. It also examines the moderating effects of attitude towards complaining (ATC). Design/methodology/approach – This paper employs a quantitative method approach using a scenario-based experiment in a banking setting. Findings - The results show that a more severe termination approach results in higher customer negative reactions. Betrayal is shown to be a key driver of customers’ behavioral reactions and ATC moderates these effects. Research limitations/implications - Future studies should examine the effects of different termination strategies in markedly different cultures and should also examine other boundary conditions such as prior warning, relationship quality, and service importance in influencing customers’ negative behavioral responses. Originality/value – This paper contributes to the service termination literature by shedding light on the impact of termination severity on customers’ reactions. It also unveils the mechanism that explains customers’ reactions to service termination. Further, it reveals that ATC moderates customers’ public (but not private) complaining behaviors.

The important role of institutional support actors in building the networking capacities of rural economic actors and communities has been noted. Over the last two decades, rural and agri-food network models of institutional support have undergone substantive change. Trust is a vital feature of such programmes, however the nature of trust, and how it is manifest, in rural support programmes is underexplored. A longitudinal qualitative methodology is adopted, involving semi-structured interviews and group discussions with artisanal food producers and institutional actors in four cases of business support. Drawing upon cases demonstrating varying levels of trust, the paper examines how trust is formed, and lost, across forms of institutional support programmes and the underlying factors that moderate trust formation. The analysis provides insights into the conflicting narratives around trust formation from advisor-client perspectives. The paper contributes to theory development by offering a conceptualisation of trust building approaches in advisor-client relationships in rural support programmes.

In the psychology of human interpersonal attraction, complementarity is a well‐recognized phenomenon, where individuals are attracted to partners with different but complementary traits to their own. Although scholarship in human–brand relations draws heavily from interpersonal attraction theory, preferred techniques for measuring self‐brand congruence tend to capture it in only one form: the similarity configuration, which expresses the extent to which brand traits essentially resemble or mirror a consumer's own. Hence, the aim of this study is to explore, for the first time, the existence of complementarity in self‐brand congruence. From a canonical correlation analysis of survey data in which respondents rated their own personality traits and those of their favorite brand, the existence of both similarity and complementarity configurations is indeed revealed. Based on this, the study then derives a measure of self‐brand congruence that captures both configurations, and tests its predictive power for a range of brand‐related outcomes. The new measure is found to perform well against existing measures of self‐brand congruence based purely on a similarity configuration, particularly for emotionally based brand‐related outcomes.

To pursue development goals, policymakers and scholars alike have proposed that actors in rural areas may usefully engage in collective actions, e.g. by forming community groups, producer associations or multi-actor networks. One proposed benefit of such collaborations is the enhanced knowledge exchange and learning which may be created, and in the literature the dynamics of this are often explained via the concepts of embeddedness and/or social capital. To date however, studies tend towards a somewhat narrow, territorial, interpretation of these concepts, with the result that current understanding of how collaborations and learning evolve between rural actors is rather constrained. This paper aims to explore a broader interpretation of these concepts, through case analysis of a producer cooperative in the Scottish shellfish sector. In the case, the realities of member and management relations are revealed, along with the types of knowledge generated and the processes by which these are, or are not, shared between actors. In terms of embeddedness, our analysis reveals that, rather than the local community context which tends to dominate the literature, it is sectoral norms and habits which shape actor relations and learning most significantly in this case. In terms of social capital, we identify that tension-fuelled social relations are not in themselves a barrier to collaboration, again in contrast to existing claims, particularly where key actors have appropriate interpersonal skills, and where a values-based mindset (‘cooperative know-how’) is held in common. The findings therefore challenge popular assumptions about how embeddedness and social capital shape collective action and learning in rural areas, and illustrate the value of interpreting these concepts more expansively.