Digitalizing shopping routines: Re-organizing household practices to enable sustainable food provisioning

New digitally enabled modes of food provisioning are being developed. The aim of this paper is to examine, empirically illustrate, and conceptualize how and under what conditions these digital food platforms become routinized and what this means for the enabling of sustainable food consumption.

Drawing on an ethnographically inspired study of three digital food provision platforms - i.e. meal box schemes, digitalized local food markets, and a food aggregator app – the paper explores how new digital food platforms are introduced and become routinized.

The study shows that to create a shopping routine, specific combinations of meanings, materialities and competencies had to be interlinked and configured to enable the consistent reproduction of a shopping practice mode. Furthermore, the analysis also shows that there are multiple ways of carving out a space for new food shopping routines. The digital platforms studied and the modes of food shopping that they enabled were able to replace, complement or reconfigure already-established food shopping practices.

Finally, the conclusions suggests that while these new modes of food provisioning became routinized, it was unlikely that they would remain so over time. Only a temporary stabilization was possible as built-in dynamics meant that the shopping routine was unable to last. This brings to the fore the challenges faced by those trying to promote new digitally enabled modes of sustainable food consumption.