Leveraging collaborations to increase the impact of food sharing platforms

The purpose of the paper is to explore how collaborations can increase the impact of food sharing platforms, which offer the potential to reduce food waste by facilitating contact between suppliers and consumers. With this comes the need to address the twofold challenge of being digital and having an economic and social-environmental mission. Thus, adopting a system perspective and recognizing stakeholders as part of a value network can maximize the generated impact.

A multiple case study analysis has been conducted on 12 food sharing platforms. Data have been collected through semi-structured interviews, triangulated with internal and external documents and content analysed.

The research outlines the systems of collaboration found in food sharing platforms characterized by two levels of actors (platform players and business players) and five different types of collaboration that can help platforms maximize their impact (boosting the network effect; capturing value; enhancing the business model; extending the type of impact; and scaling up).

The research offers important contributions for the advancement of the field, adding evidence on the opportunities offered by collaborations to generate impact for business and society in the context of the sharing economy and food industry. The research allows to identify the concept of “sustainability-oriented sharing platforms” as a subset of sharing economy platforms characterized by a dual mission and related challenges. From a managerial point of view, the study highlights how designing and implementing collaborations with the stakeholders can increase platforms' impact consistently with the life cycle and short- and long-term perspectives.