What’s Cooking is an update on all things related to CHEFS: the Culture, Health, Environment, Food and Society research cluster at Sheffield Hallam University. What’s been cooking since our last edition?
In this April 2020 edition:
- An update on CHEFS activities;
- Call for content for the June 2020 edition of What’s Cooking.
In these strange and unsettling times, I hope a little CHEFS news will brighten your day.
Stay well!
Cheers, Jen
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Recent CHEFS Activities
Jillian Newton is leading SHU BREW 2020, a one-day conference specifically curated for the microbrewing community, with invited academic and industry speakers, beer tasting and networking. The event is currently scheduled to take place on July 16th, although that is being kept under review due to the coronavirus situation. Nevertheless, the event planning has brought a range colleagues together in new ways, and has already attracted registrations (register here). Find out more on the SHU BREW 2020 webpage.
Paul Beresford and Craig Hirst had their article ‘How Consumers Reconcile Discordant Food Retailer Brand Images’ accepted for publication in the Journal of Marketing Management. The article is based on part of their data from on ongoing longitudinal analysis of discount food retailer switching behaviour. This particular study is positioned in relation to the evolving market conditions of UK grocery retail and offers insight into the consumer led co-creative processes underlying the switching behaviour to discount food retailers by middle-class consumers. Based on phenomenological interviews with ideographic analysis, this research draws on theories related to cultural branding and brand relationships, to demonstrate how consumers negotiate individuated brand meanings. It reveals how, in spite of normative marketplace discourses, consumers are able to reframe and negotiate personally relevant meanings suitable to their own lifestyles and life projects. In so doing, this study contributes to the literature by offering an account of how brand relationships are appropriated in negotiations with stigmatised brand images to make them relevant and suitable for hitherto incongruent market segments. The findings therefore hold relevance for grocery retail managers and other practitioners engaged with the management of low involvement and mundane brands, who will have a better understanding of the process through which such relationships manifest themselves in food retail switching behaviour. Craig and Paul are now pulling together a partner paper that looks at how the news media is playing a role in this process through the stories they report about grocery retail brands over time.
Dianne Dean, Pallavi Singh, Katie Dunn and Wei Chen have been invited to provide an outline bid for the Leverhulme Trust and is worth approximately £240,000. The bid focusses on food waste which is a global problem, and household food waste in developed countries is a serious concern. However, this trend is also becoming an issue in newly emerging economies where food has traditionally been scarce and optimising food resources was crucial. The team seek to understand what food frugality practices continue to be used and what are being lost. It appears that we have forgotten how to treasure food so this research focuses on how intergenerational attitudes towards food waste are transferred, what food knowledge has been lost and how relearning can be incorporated into family practices. The team hopes to recruit two PhD students to conduct research in both India and China and help to build critical mass for the SWEFS and CHEFS research clusters.
Jennifer Smith Maguire recently had two articles published related to her research on wine and wine markets. “Aesthetic logics, terroir and the lamination of grower champagne” appears in Consumption, Markets and Culture in a special issue on ‘Taste’ and is co-authored Steve Charters (School of Wine & Spirits Business, Burgundy School of Business). Through an analysis of how ‘big brand’ and ‘grower’ champagnes are represented by trade associations, small-scale producers and wine writers, they develop the concept of lamination for making sense of how aesthetic logics shape markets. The other article comes from research with colleagues at La Trobe University: “Seeking a competitive advantage in wine tourism: Heritage and storytelling at the cellar-door,” co-authored with Warwick Frost, Jennifer Frost and Paul Strickland, appears in the International Journal of Hospitality Management. Drawing from interviews with representatives of wineries in southern Australia, the article examines issues of heritage, authenticity, branding and storytelling.
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Call for content for the next edition of What’s Cooking
The next edition of What’s Cooking will be June 2020. Please send content (updates up to 200 words (images optional), and relevant calls for papers/conference/event announcements) to j.smith1@shu.ac.uk by Thursday 28 May.
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