ABSTRACT
Various food scandals (e.g. BSE, EHEC, and rotten meat) have sensitized the public and helped create a principle of scepticism with regard to conventional food production in recent years (Bánáti, 2011; Van Der Ploeg, 2010). As a consequence, consumer demand is becoming increasingly hybridized with a growing importance of ‘green’ lifestyles (Pearson, Henryks, and Jones, 2011). Parallel to this, structural change in agriculture has been progressing due to decreasing marginal economic benefits. Against this background, the emergence of an ‘integrated territorial paradigm’ can be detected as an alternative to the conventional, modern paradigm of the agri-food business (Sonnino and Marsden, 2006). Characteristics of this paradigm are the shortening of the relations between producers and consumers as well as the enhancement of products with added value in the form of information regarding origin and quality in order to regain trust and to re-embed food production in easily understandable chains (Renting and Wiskerke, 2010). The empirical diversity of such short food supply chains (SFSC) is immense and case studies show that there are not any clear demarcations between ‘alternative’ SFSC and conventional food chains. In any case, SFSCs are assumed to occupy only a small market niche up to now (statistics are not available to prove or disprove this; Kneafsey et al., 2013). Renting and Wiskerke (2010) state that ‘existing initiatives remain relatively small and localized and […] viable dissemination models (either by upscaling or “multiplication”) are unclear’. Nevertheless, SFSCs are often perceived as having strong potential for strengthening rural economies (Kögl and Tietze, 2010; Renting et al., 2003).
