Sustainable development approaches in the food and beverage industry

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2011 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 2,0, Edinburgh Napier University, course: Business Strategy & Sustainable Development, language: English, abstract: The purpose of this dissertation is to demonstrate the necessity and implementation of sustainable development in business, focusing on the food an beverage industry by using the examples of Nestlé SA and Kraft Foods Inc. The literature review builds the theoretical framework of sustainable development by examining the drivers for sustainability, triple bottom line approach, shareholder theory, stakeholder theory, and stakeholder groups based on secondary data. The case study methodology rely-ing on public company resources is used to analyse, evaluate, and compare the spe-cific industry drivers for sustainability and the companies' approaches of sustainable development. Based on the theoretical framework, the analysis and discussion of the prioritised issues, approaches, results revealed that the two analysed approaches are successfully in promoting sustainability. Furthermore it was revealed that in-creased economic, environmental, and social value is increasingly created by taking stakeholder claims into account and vertically implementing sustainable development in the upstream and downstream of the value chain. Therefore, it was identified that Kraft Foods' approach is marginal less successful due to its focus on indirect collabo-ration and partnership rather than the direct support of its stakeholder to implement sustainability along the value chain. These findings are limited according to the unique characteristics of the food and beverage industry and the availability of data.