Supervisors: Alice Grønhøj & Susanne Pedersen
Discussants: Marija Banovic & Sascha Steinmann

Abstract
In the efforts to move toward more sustainable consumption, family households are often key sites for change. However, sustainability-related actions have typically been studied from the individual perspective, and despite marketing theory claiming that “the family is the most important consumer buying organization in society” (Kotler et al., 2019, p. 199), research looking into the importance of the meso-level family interaction with regard to sustainability is limited within the field of marketing. Given that food is the single strongest lever to attain environmental sustainability, the EAT-Lancet commission suggested that consumption of foods such as red meat will have to be reduced by more than 50 %. In changing consumption practices and achieving sustainability goals the importance of youth is widely articulated by societal actors and business corporations such as frozen food leader McCain who find that family mealtimes are dominated by the “Greta effect”, with older children encouraging parents to eat more greens. Nonetheless, research on the significance of adolescents regarding sustainable consumption to date remain limited and fragmented, and whether they act as catalysts for more sustainable consumer practices in the home is not evidently clear. Thus, through a qualitative family approach involving parents and adolescents, this project seeks to understand family food consumption and adolescents’ potential to drive change in family households with the case of meat reduction.

The results from our first paper show that family food consumption is often driven by the desire to uphold harmony and family cohesion with a special attention to children’s preferences. Therefore, children and adolescents act as important “gatekeepers” to change household food consumption and meat reduction. Further, we identify barriers to change in the gendered work “hidden” in the tasks of planning the integration of more “green” dishes. Tentative results from our second study indicate that adolescents themselves express a co-responsibility for household food consumption while taking a constructive and pragmatic “green” consumer role considering other family members’ feelings. We argue that findings from this research carry important implications for public interventions, social marketing, and marketers that aim to encourage consumers to model sustainable eating practices.

Everyone is welcome!