Value for the calorie?—Corporate social responsibility and benchmarking analysis of calorie efficiency in food retailing

The potential role of food retailing as a determinant for the growth in obesity prevalence has been the subject of a number of studies in the literature. This paper develops and demonstrates a corporate social responsibility evaluation tool—calorie efficiency—to benchmark a specific retail chain's corporate sustainability performance in promoting healthier food choice at the consumers, based on household panel shopping data for five food categories.

The studied retail chain has performed slightly better than its closest competitors for four of the five product categories, when adjusted for changes in the retailers' customer population. The results demonstrate the importance of adjusting for changes in customer population when undertaking such benchmarking—especially when the food retail sector undergoes substantial structural developments.

The developed framework can rather straightforwardly be transferred to other domains, such as business activities' impacts on climate change or the environment.