![]() In most focus areas, the large majority of respondents attribute responsibility to one or several of the other stakeholder groups but not to consumers of meat products. This is followed by food safety, slaughtering, and transport, while environment and social issues related to the working conditions of employees are judged to have lower relevance. Results reveal that consumers consider animal husbandry as the core area where there is a need to take responsibility. Data were analyzed via content analysis using a combination of inductive and deductive analyses in an iterative process. The study is based on an online consumer survey (n = 1003) including standardized and open-ended questions. Furthermore, the study provides an understanding of potential actions of consumer social responsibility (CNSR) and reasons for not taking responsibility. Therefore, this study aimed to identify the relevant focus areas within the meat food value chain that consumers attach relevance to. It is evident that sustainable meat consumption and production require shared responsibility for actions and consequences by consumers and producers. Raising this might help reduce the number of processed juices on the market. The experts report that consumer information is challenging because of low food literacy. Organic juice is preferred when it is cloudy and natural fluctuations are interpreted as an indicator of natural quality. The experts prefer directly bottled juice of local raw materials but chiefly accept juice made from concentrate of exotic raw materials because of environmental concerns. It covers the whole food chain plus aspects of social and environmental sustainability. We found that the experts’ understanding of process quality mostly includes more aspects than the EU organic production regulation. Interview topics were (i) quality of organic juice processing in general, (ii) assessment of specific processing techniques, (iii) product quality of organic juice and (iv) flow of information between producer and consumer. ![]() To get insight into practitioner perspectives, we conducted semi-structured expert interviews with nine employees of seven partly organic juice processing companies from Germany and Austria. For the development of organic processing, practitioner perspectives can provide valuable input. While the EU organic production regulation focuses on agricultural production, private standards provide more detailed information about further processing. ![]() Organic food quality is based on processing. In view of the ethical challenges present in the fruit juice chain and discussed in the paper, the increasing demand of consumers for sustainable products and the high competition in the sector, communicating different sustainability aspects can be an opportunity for fruit juice producers and retailers to differentiate their products on the highly saturated fruit juice market. Discussion/Conclusion – Communicating sustainability aspects of fruit juice production via on-package labels is scarce in conventional retail stores. Only a small number of products consider other areas of sustainability, such as social concerns or regional production. ![]() However, most of those products were found in the organic food retailer and are organic juices. Results reveal that nearly one quarter of the products has labels signaling sustainable aspects. Results/Findings – Overall, 562 fruit juices were examined. The data was evaluated using content analysis. On-product communication of all fruit juice products (‘not from concentrate (NFC)’ fruit juices, ’reconstituted (RECON)’ fruit juices, fruit nectars and smoothies) from five retailers (two full-range retailers, two discounters, one organic supermarket) was analyzed. Design/Methodology – A market investigation at the Point-of Sale (POS) was conducted in July 2013. This seems promising against the background that there are several ethical challenges the fruit juice chain is increasingly confronted with and consumers demand for sustainable products is also rising. Purpose/Value – The objective of this paper is to determine (1) the extent to which sustainability serves as a sales argument and (2) which areas of sustainability are communicated in the fruit juice industry.
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