Towards a better understanding of sustainability gaps in retail organizations 

ABSTRACT Retailers have been identified as important actors in driving sustainable change, due to their vital role in connecting production and consumption. In this paper, we explore what retailers do to enable consumers to act more sustainable. Whereas there is ample research focusing either on sustainability on the production and sourcing side or on sustainable consumer behaviors, we bridge the two by focusing specifically on consumer-facing sustainability work in grocery retail organizations. Through workshops, interviews, and secondary data, we find a clear ambition among retailers to help consumers behave sustainably. However, our findings also point to several barriers to sustainability work within the organization. The paper concludes by outlining a model of different sustainability ambition-action gaps within retail organizations and possible solutions for closing them.


Introduction
With their unique position as a link between manufacturers and consumers, retailers are likely to have a strong impact on the move towards a more environmentally and socially sustainable production and consumption as advocated by the United Nations Sustainability Development Goal 12 (Vadakkepatt et al. 2021).Consequently, sustainability is high on the agenda for many retailers (e.g.Dagilienė, Varaniūtė, and Pütter 2022;Saber and Weber 2019).To date, research on sustainability in retail has, however, primarily been focused on the production and sourcing side (e.g.Vadakkepatt et al. 2021) or on barriers and/or enablers for consumer behaviors becoming more sustainable (e.g.Carrington, Neville, and Whitwell 2014;Jacobs et al. 2018) without focusing specifically on how retailers integrate sustainability throughout their organizations.
What is more, contemporary retailers are increasingly moving their sustainability focus to also include consumers -trying to enable them to consume more sustainably.This shift in focus is also requested by consumers as suggested, for example, by an international survey showing that 85% of consumers are interested in getting help from a retailer in doing some kind of change in how they live, shop, and eat (Accenture 2021).Such help seems especially called for when it comes to sustainability, as consumers have been documented to suffer from an ambition-action gap, meaning that consumers do not behave in line with their sustainability motives and intentions when it comes to consumption (e.g.Carrington, Neville, and Whitwell 2014;White, Habib, and Hardisty 2019).Enabling consumers to move towards more sustainable consumption requires rather large changes within retail organizations, for example in terms of assortments and promotions (e.g.Gravely and Fraser 2018), calling for more research on how sustainability work is performed within such organizations.
Although ample research investigates how to get consumers to change to more sustainable options (for a comprehensive review, see White, Habib, and Hardisty 2019), less is known about how retailers work to enable such changes.In this paper, we set out to fill this gap by investigating what grocery retail practitioners do to enable consumers to act more sustainable.Whereas extant literature on consumer behavior point to retailers' potentially vital role in making consumer behavior more sustainable (e.g. by changing the assortment they offer, helping consumers prioritize between different sustainability concerns, or offering shopping environments that help consumers bridge the actionambition gap, Blom and Rosengren 2020;Carrington, Neville, and Whitwell 2014), we explore what grocery retailers are saying and doing as well as what barriers they perceive in acting to enable consumers to overcome this sustainability gap.
The empirical approach combines a workshop series with actors in the food system, practitioner interviews and secondary data (websites and sustainability reports), thus answering the call from Haenlein et al. (2022) to explore societal issues through an engaged scholarship method.We find that several initiatives to help consumers act more sustainably are already in place, but also that many barriers slowdown their implementation and overall progress towards a more sustainable grocery market.In fact, the findings show a substantial ambition-action gap within grocery retail organizations.By identifying different sustainability gaps within these organizations and suggesting possible solutions for bridging them, we contribute insights to retail managers who want to promote a shift towards more sustainable consumption.Given that a third of the world's greenhouse gas emissions originate in the food system (Clark et al. 2020) exploring this issue in the grocery sector seems especially important, but we also discuss how the findings might be applicable to other retail sectors.

Background
Although sustainability is a multifaceted construct, most research regards environmental, social, and economic aspects as the three pillars of sustainability (e.g.Aksoy et al. 2022;Vadakkepatt et al. 2021).From a consumer perspective, the relative importance of these three aspects can vary (Carrington, Neville, and Whitwell 2014), which means that the definition of sustainable consumer behavior often differs between consumers.Similarly, practitioners have been argued to have various perspectives of sustainability, which could also lead to challenges in organizational decision-making (Elg, Hultman, and Welinder 2020;Wakeman et al. 2022).In this paper, we use the tripartite definition of sustainability as a point of departure but acknowledge that various actors have somewhat different perspectives on what sustainability is.
Although there is substantial work on the consumer ambition-action gap when it comes to sustainability (see White, Habib, and Hardisty 2019 for a review), less research investigates how retail practitioners work to align overall sustainability ambitions with actions within their organizations.Several of the challenges consumers face when making a sustainable shopping decision are, however, linked to organizational decisions related to sustainability.For example, external barriers identified in consumer research such as assortment (e.g. the lack of a sustainable alternatives to choose; Luchs et al. 2010;Röös and Tjärnemo 2011), pricing (price difference between more or less sustainable options; Visser, Schoormans, and Vogtländer 2018) and (limited) communication about sustainability (Röös and Tjärnemo 2011) are directly linked to decisions by retailers, but also to norms in society (Harris, Roby, and Dibb 2016).
There are also several similarities in terms of the required shift in perspective needed to enable sustainable consumption among consumers and sustainable change within organizations.Consumer research has identified internal barriers that are specific to the individual, such as low interest and knowledge (Harris, Roby, and Dibb 2016), perceptions of sustainable consumer behavior being effortful (Harris, Roby, and Dibb 2016;White, Habib, and Hardisty 2019), the need to change habits (Carrington, Neville, and Whitwell 2014;Röös and Tjärnemo 2011;White, Habib, and Hardisty 2019), perceived lower quality of sustainable products (Visser, Schoormans, and Vogtländer 2018) as well as a low belief in the effectiveness of the potential impact of sustainable shopping decision (Röös and Tjärnemo 2011).Similar tradeoffs between short-term and long-term goals (Le Roux and Pretorius 2016; Wu and Pagell 2011) as well as internal and external barriers (De Koeijer, De Lange, and Wever 2017) have been detected within organizations.In this literature, short-term and long-term goals are often described in terms of profitability and sustainability (e.g.Le Roux and Pretorius 2016; Wu and Pagell 2011).There is an implied tension between economic and sustainability priorities, due to a perception that sustainability decisions (more long-term goals) typically will require the organization to refrain from immediate profits (more short-term goals).For example, tradeoffs between sustainability and commercial and functional aspects have been found to impact decision-making related to packaging (De Koeijer, De Lange, and Wever 2017).Another tradeoff that has been examined is between sustainability and resilience (Rajesh 2021).
Embedding sustainability in decision-making has also been pinpointed as a perceived 'add on' compared to commercial aspects (De Koeijer, De Lange, and Wever 2017).Thus, sustainability is sometimes perceived to force organizations to refrain from other things that are more important.In addition, the perceived complexity of sustainability poses challenges to organizations when making decisions, which can lead them to follow old working patterns instead of forming new ones (Le Roux and Pretorius 2016).Research has also demonstrated that both cognitive and/or moral awareness can stand in the way of sustainability decisions (Wakeman et al. 2022).Even if an organization is made aware of the issue, motivation (i.e.moral awareness) is also needed to be able to act on this issue within the organization.
There is also research focusing more directly on what organizations do to enable consumers to make more sustainable decisions within grocery retail specifically.Although there are many opportunities to use retail stores as tools to promote sustainable behaviors, research finds that this potential is rarely utilized (Gravely and Fraser 2018;Lehner and Wiese2015).Among the barriers identified are a perceived lack of customer demand having potential economical downsides as well as a perceived risk of turning consumers away by pointing fingers and/or overwhelming them with information (Lehner and Wiese 2015;Tjärnemo and Södahl 2015).For example, Tjärnemo and Södahl (2015) find that promoting sustainable consumption by advocating less meat consumption is seen as problematic by retail employees as the meat category is important for both attracting and keeping customers as well as for profitability.

Research method
In this paper, we use an engaged scholarship approach (e.g.Haenlein et al. 2022;Van de Ven 2007).To this end, the empirical data was collected in a Northern European country as part of a larger action research project dealing with sustainability issues in the food and grocery sector.In this project, we used a combination of workshops and interviews with actors in the food system, complemented with secondary data through websites and sustainability reports.The interviews and workshops were organized as a series of events co-created by academics, consultants, and actors in the food system as a 'Food and Grocery Insight Dialogue' (the dialogue).The dialogue was initiated by the authors of the current paper (two academic researchers and one management consultant with background in academia) and enabled the researchers to continually gather opinions and feedback from practitioners throughout the research process (Bansal et al. 2012;Van de Ven 2007).Although the scope of the project was quite broad (focusing on multiple stakeholders across the food and grocery value chain), this paper zooms in on the grocery retailers and their sustainability work, specifically.

Research activities
As a starting point, we invited actors from the food sector within the authors' network to take part in the dialogue.In line with the engaged scholarship approach, the aim was to explore possible collaborations among different actors to propel sustainable change in the food system.The interest among actors was substantial and participants were encouraged to invite new participants from their own organizations and networks to join.The great interest among actors led to a workshop series and a continuous dialogue between the authors and the various participants.The workshops were co-created with the actors who took part and were designed to follow the interests of the actors participating in the dialogues.
While the bulk of the empirical data relies on participation and observation throughout the workshops, we also conducted interviews with employees in grocery retail organizations to complement and extend these insights.The data was also complemented by secondary data from websites and sustainability reports and continuous meetings between the academic partners and the management consultancy involved.An overview of the full material from the workshops and the interviews used in this paper is displayed in Table 1.

Workshops
Three workshops were carried out to investigate what actors in the food system can jointly do to make it more sustainable.The three workshops were held between November 2021 and April 2022 and varied in length between 2 and 3 hours.In total 19 participants from 12 different organizations participated in one or more workshops.
Retailers, startups, non-profit organizations, consultants, data producers, and researchers were engaged in the workshops, but for this paper we focus specifically on the experience of the retailers.
The purpose of the first workshop was to explore how food and grocery actors can drive collective impact and find new interaction models between grocers and consumers.By inviting actors from various parts of the food system, we wanted to broaden the scope of solutions beyond individual organizations.The insights from the first step resulted in two focus areas being identified as important for the coming steps: the consumer ambition-action gap and food waste.In this paper, we focus on consumer-facing aspects of such sustainability work.The workshop lasted for 3 hours.
The purpose of the second workshop was to explore ideas and identify concrete actions on how actors in the food system, both individually and collectively, can help consumers act more sustainably as well as minimize customer food waste.The outcome from the workshop was over 100 ideas on how to cope with these challenges.The ideas were reviewed by the authors and two consultants and synthesized into eight future actions.In this paper, we focus on the intraorganizational ideas and issues mentioned in these discussions.The workshop lasted 3 h.
From the review of the collected ideas and solutions, eight concrete actions were presented in the third workshop.The participants were asked to rank these eight actions based on importance.The aim was to collectively prioritize different actions and to identify key stakeholders, enablers and/or challenges, success measures, and concrete examples to make these future solutions more actionable.For this paper, the solutions were used as catalyzers for discussions that help us better understand barriers for implementing sustainability in grocery organizations.This workshop lasted 2 h.

Interviews
To collect additional insights, we also conducted interviews with practitioners in various roles across several grocery retailers.The purpose of the interviews was to understand how retail practitioners perceive their ability to help consumers meet challenges related to sustainability.The participants were identified through the workshops with the aim of interviewing a range of different roles across different retailers.The sample consisted of participants in the dialogue as well as their colleagues.Participants were contacted by the authors of the paper.They were given a brief description of the project and asked if they wanted to be part of the study through an interview.Seven participants gave their consent to take part in the study.Five out of seven participants also gave consent to audio record the interviews, and the remaining two participants gave consent to take notes of the interview.The five audio-recorded interviews were transcribed before they were analyzed.
The interviews were conducted by phone (due to covid-19) in February and March 2022 by the first author.The length of the interviews varied between 25 and 30 minutes.The interviews were semi-structured with open-ended questions.An interview guide was developed to explore practitioners view of sustainability in their everyday work and how it may contribute towards helping customers act more sustainable.The main topics were how participants perceive sustainability and how it relates to their everyday work in general, how their everyday work can help consumers act more sustainable, which specific activities they have implemented to help consumers act more sustainably, and possible barriers that might hinder them from doing so.The insights from the interviews were also shared with the participants in the dialogue during workshops to enrich the conversation when discussing potential collective actions.

Secondary data
As a complement to our first-hand data, we also searched the websites and read the sustainability reports of the three main grocery retailers in the market where the study was conducted.Specifically, we searched for 'sustainability goals' on the three websites and read the sustainability reports, focusing on the sustainability goals that aimed at helping consumers overcome their ambition-action gap.This search is not exhaustive, but synthesizing information found on these webpages and sustainability reports gives an overview of the retailer's ambitions (see Tjärnemo and Södahl 2015 for a similar approach).

Data analysis
To explore how retailers are translating their ambitions into actions in everyday work, we rely on the experiences shared by participants in our workshops and interviews as well as secondary data.To analyze the workshop material and the dialogue progress, a workgroup comprising academic researchers and management consultants had continuous meetings throughout the dialogue.
The final analysis of the data was performed by the first two authors of this paper.Before the analysis, all participants were anonymized to only include generic information on roles and company of the participant.The participants in the workshops were also anonymized.All participants from the interviews and the workshops were given an ID number, which is used throughout this paper (see Lehner and Wiese (2015) for similar procedure).The transcripts and notes from the interviews were read separately by each researcher to identify themes with potential relevance for our research (see Lehner and Wiese 2015;Roggeveen and Rosengren 2022).Thus, the material was initially themed by the two researchers separately before a joint analysis in which the themed materials were compared and synthesized into the findings presented below.

Findings
The initial response when inviting participants to join the dialogue was overwhelmingly positive, suggesting that sustainability was high on the agenda for most actors.Interestingly, the participants came not only from sustainability departments, indicating that the issue is addressed more broadly across the organizations (see Table 1 for an overview).
Overall, we found a clear ambition among retailers to help consumers act more sustainably, but also that the operationalization of the goals and activities designed to reach them varied across actors.All retailers had elaborate ambitions related to sustainability documented on webpages and in sustainability reports, and these ambitions were often mentioned in our interviews, but references to them were typically somewhat vague and without precision.Whereas some goals had been operationalized through concrete actions many others had not.Table 2 displays an illustrative list of such actions, focusing on initiatives that aim to help consumers bridge their ambition action gap (note that this is not a comprehensive list of all initiatives).In many cases, it was difficult to get a coherent understanding of how different goals were linked to each other and how the prioritization between them is done.This has been described in the previous research as limited cognitive and/or moral awareness (Wakeman et al. 2022).This issue was also raised in the workshops and many discussions revolved around the understanding of what sustainability really is, both on a societal, organizational, and individual level.As pointed out by one of the participants: 'We are missing our mission to put a man on the moon' (ID18), referring to the ambition of the US space program from the 1960s and the lack of coherence in terms of sustainability ambitions within his organization as well as the industry at large.
The workshops and interviews also uncovered several barriers to translating sustainability ambitions into action.It was clear that our participants experienced a substantial ambition-action gap when it came to sustainability work within their own organizations, and participants outlined several tensions within their organizations that stood in the way for efforts designed to help customers move towards more sustainable consumption.

Knowing what sustainability is
One of the major barriers was difficulties in understanding what sustainability really is and how it should be measured.This was mentioned both in interviews and during the workshops.Although all the studied organizations had employed sustainability experts and implemented various sustainability certificates, frameworks, and systems both sustainability experts and generalists within our interviews and workshops seemed to share this concern.For example, one interviewee mentioned that the organization had not yet come to terms with how they should measure sustainability linked to their products and what aspects they should measure: 'We have all these goals: like a plastic goal, and a climate goal and (. ..) we are to become climate neutral by a certain date.But how can you do this on the product level?I am the one speaking to the suppliers about this and we are working together with this thing . . .I don't remember the name . . . . it is . . .hm . . .sustainability something . . .anyway -how can we reach this target if we can't measure it?'.(ID3) In this organization, processes for measuring health aspects linked to a product were long in place but finding suitable processes for measuring sustainability had proven to be more difficult.
Some participants also mentioned that sustainability decisions were sometimes made based on 'feelings' rather than knowledge or impact.For example, one retailer had started to invest in farming options within the store without knowing for sure whether this was really a more sustainable alternative than importing the same produce: 'We sell about 85-86 tons of cucumber every year.And that, and that's what will be produced here.We will become self-sufficient on cucumber.Which feels good.Because, during the winter months, we buy cucumbers that are transported from Spain.This is based on my amateur opinion though'.(ID4) Concerns were also raised regarding what this implies for any efforts to help consumers move to more sustainable consumption: 'how can we make consumers understand sustainability so they can make sustainable decisions and at the same time make them understand that is not always a clear-cut (. ..) often a product might be more sustainable from a climate perspective but maybe not from a social perspective'.(ID1) These difficulties seemed to be shared across organizations and were repeatedly mentioned as a barrier to act on the ambition to move towards more sustainable consumption.During the workshops, we also noted frustration with this issue and how lack of knowledge could lead to hopelessness and inertia rather than propel action.In the workshops, discussions often came back to how to change the value-chain narrative around sustainability and find a common ground on what is important.For example, In-store Sustainability Labels In-store communication that guides the customers to more sustainable products in the assortment Decision aids for customers at the point of purchase a shared sustainability label or joint database across actors were commonly suggested solutions in the workshops.In addition, discussions mentioned knowledge sharing and knowledge dissemination as important for enabling the food system to move further on sustainability issues, suggesting that overcoming these barriers might not necessarily be done within organizations but rather across them.

Building an assortment of sustainable products
In the interviews, several participants shared frustration related to their ability to offer assortments that are in line with consumer and societal requirements for sustainable change.Two main sources of tensions were identified: supplier contracts and lack of economy of scale.Both these tensions might help explain why retailers are not necessarily offering assortments and promotions that would enable consumers to change to more sustainable consumer behavior First, supplier contracts were mentioned as a key driver of what product categories to display more prominently in communication and stores.These contracts dictate which products are put on display and which ones are promoted in various channels.Contracts are based on negotiations between suppliers and retailers where this is also specified.Thus, the products communicated toward the consumer are often based on the economic incentives offered by the suppliers rather than sustainability: 'We have these really big suppliers with whom we have very good agreements and who deliver good prices and they, they get a place in all our channels.In all grocers' channels.(. ..)What I mean is that there is a long way to go -to get our really big suppliers to also promote new and less popular but more sustainable and healthier product instead for the top seller'.(e.g., ID2) The current business practices thus cause tensions between the ambition of delivering a shopping environment that enables consumers to act more sustainably and the organizational structures for doing so.These practices lead both retailers and suppliers to promote high-volume and/or high margin products rather than products that perform well based on other sustainability aspects, even if they might have potential to develop into high volume products over time.For example, a more sustainable and/or healthy product that is slow to pick up in sales will quickly be replaced.Just as in the previous research (Le Roux and Pretorius 2016; Wu and Pagell 2011), it was mentioned that the current system is designed to drive short-term sales of profitable products rather than taking a long-term view to promote sustainable ones, thus favoring immediate economic goals over sustainability goals.Moreover, in the workshops, discussions often came back to the use of 'lossleaders' on less sustainable products such as imported meat in marketing efforts.In fact, a solution proposing a joint agreement across all actors in the industry to put an end to this practice was ranked as a top solution in our workshop.The economic system linked to the use of loss-leaders from the meat category was also seen as a barrier in the research by Tjärnemo and Södahl (2015).
Secondly, in our interviews, sustainable products (e.g.vegetarian or vegan alternatives) were repeatedly mentioned to be more expensive (see also Visser, Schoormans, and Vogtländer 2018), which could lead be a barrier to reaching economy of scale for these products: 'This is a giant challenge; it is a giant challenge we have, that we don't get any economy of scale in it.With low volumes we can't find an actor who wants to do it ((produce sustainable protein alternatives)).Once volumes are up then it should be easy to produce it ((sustainable protein alternatives)) and then we would offer great, good affordable items!'.(ID3) As sustainable products are often new to the market, they do not have the same volume as traditional ones.Lower purchase volumes mean higher purchase price and transportation costs for retailers, and thus these products are unlikely to offer a good price/value ratio for both retailers and consumers, leading to a downward spiral where the product is likely to be underperforming and kicked out of the assortment.

Communicating sustainability messages
Another difficulty for participants related to how to communicate about sustainability.Even if retailers were to have perfect knowledge about what sustainability issues to focus on, it was clear that there are additional concerns and challenges related to how to convey this information to consumers.This challenge has recently been discussed in research (Aksoy et al. 2022).In both workshops and interviews, participants mentioned several challenges related to communicating and explaining sustainability to consumers.Two broad aspects were brought up, namely, how to best communicate the complex nature of sustainability and what is allowed in terms of such communication.
Practitioners working with sustainability communication mentioned challenges related to how to simplify a complex issue such as sustainability when conveying it to consumers.Typically, communications in grocery retail are focused on simple messages and shortterm benefits such as price, whereas sustainability issues might be hard to convey to consumers in an equally simple manner.Especially in a grocery context where decisions are made very habitual and consumers spend relatively little cognitive effort before making a shopping decision (Melis et al. 2015), this was seen as challenging.An example mentioned was conveying information related to complex issues such as antibiotic resistance on product packaging: 'A lot of antibiotics are used in animal production, and this contributes to increased antibiotic resistance.But it's very difficult for the consumer to understand this issue because it's not about getting antibiotic resistance bacteria through food we eat, it's about animal production spreading them in the environment and increasing antibiotic resistance in society.Communicating that related to products or on the product package is not easy'.(ID1) Moreover, participants mentioned that shifting focus from communicating price and offers towards sustainability was risky -in part because of fears that consumers would not think that this information is relevant to them, but also because the retailer could be perceived as pointing fingers and telling consumers what to do: 'It requires quite a lot of thinking on our behalf if we are to move from communicating price to products that are based on sustainability or health -we can be seen as providing pointers in a way that is not what the customer wants'.(ID2) Similar findings have been identified in the previous research (see Lehner and Wiese 2015;Tjärnemo and Södahl 2015) and our findings thus suggest that this barrier remains, despite an increased focus on sustainability across retailers and in society at large.Furthermore, sustainability communication competes with other messages conveyed to consumers.Similar to Tjärnemo andSödahl (2015), challenges related to what can be referred to as information clutter were also mentioned.There are many diverse types of information that should or could be conveyed at the point of purchase (e.g.information about brands and prices as well as features related to health, environmental, and social aspects ID5) and it is not clear what type of information should be or is prioritized by the organization.These concerns echo challenges related to internal processes which will be discussed further below.
Interviews also revealed that practitioners were cautious about communicating about sustainability due to uncertainties related to regulatory requirements and trade agreements.
'It is also important to consider how not to communicate: of course, we want to communicate correctly and legally and not exaggerate.But ((current regulations)) can also mean that you become very cautious and tiptoe, which means that you don't dare to argue ((the actual benefits of more sustainable products))'.(ID2) Concerns with regard to what is legally allowed when it comes to communicating sustainability were common.In fact, several participants mentioned legal cases where actors who have tried to make claims or move consumers in a certain sustainability direction had been forced to change, either by legal decisions or by consumer resistance to such efforts.In addition, there were many unclarities and insecurities with regard to what was allowed or not when comparing products or communicating that one product is more sustainable than another, not only due to regulatory requirements but also due to trade agreements and supplier contracts.This caution was especially present when it came to making comparisons between products and was often mentioned as a barrier to implementing decision aids that help consumers to pick the more sustainable options in any given product category.

Revisiting internal processes
Participants also raised issues related to the need for revisiting the internal work processes to facilitate the translation of sustainability ambition into action.Specifically, there were three interlinked issues: 1) how performance is measured, 2) the trade-off between sustainability and sales and 3) making the ambition into concrete actions in everyday business.
One tension was a perceived misalignment between key performance indicators (KPIs) of different departments within the organization.For example, some departments base their performance measures on the sales of products such as meat, making efforts to promote alternative proteins something that should be done carefully: 'For example, we are careful to say to cut back on meat.Because there are large volumes in this product category, and other departments have their KPIs based on this, then we would conflict with what others in the organization are doing'.(ID7) Balancing sales and sustainability targets are often mentioned as a key tradeoff where internal processes were not yet in place.Thus, processes within the organization that align performance measures to allow the organization to translate their ambition into action often seemed to be lacking.This lack of alignment or cooperation across departments has also been discussed as barriers to embedding sustainability into the decision-making process in the previous research (De Koeijer, De Lange, and Wever 2017).
It was also mentioned that arguing for sustainability initiatives based on established frameworks within the organization is difficult.Many sustainability initiatives do not necessarily result in an immediate effect on sales and profit measures, thus leading managers who want to pursue them to face difficulties in bridging different timehorizons within the organization.Especially, short-term sales tend to have the upper hand whenever priorities between different routes of actions are taken: 'Yes, well, to be completely transparent, of course it's always a trade-off with the business.In order for it to be sustainable for everyone, it has to be -a retailer will not say no to sales and market shares'.(ID6) In fact, investing in sustainability was sometimes perceived as the opposite of profitable.In addition, the interviews and discussions during the workshops revealed a 'shared understanding' that promoting sustainable consumption can lead to a decrease in profit.For example, one of the interviewees (ID3) mentioned that even if vegetarian alternatives have a higher margin, promoting more sustainable alternatives (instead of meat products) is perceived as a risk, as customers might instead go to competitors.Again, perceived tradeoffs between short-term economic goals and long-term sustainability goals have been highlighted in the previous research (Le Roux and Pretorius 2016; Wu and Pagell 2011) as something that refrain retailers from acting on their ambitions.As discussed above, this tradeoff also makes it difficult to build an assortment of sustainable products and moves retailers to continue doing business as usual.
When translating organizational ambition into concrete actions in everyday business the lack of supportive processes within the organizations was often expressed as a challenge: 'We're part of a large group and we don't have infinite resources to work with, it's about priorities, how much can we do and what needs to be turned around, we ((sometime have to)) wait ((with sustainability initiatives)) because something else has been prioritized, higher up in the organization'.(ID6).
However, several interviewees also mentioned that some processes were already in place.For example, when it comes to offering a more sustainable assortment, fish was mentioned as a category where clear processes and organizational guidelines were established, steering the assortment offered to customers to become more sustainable.Similar findings were also identified by Tjärnemo and Södahl (2015).Thus, there seems to be a lack of supporting processes within the organization to enable managers to translate corporate ambitions into action.More specifically, processes that align a) sustainability performance measures across departments and b) overall sustainability and profitability goals often seem to be lacking.

Discussion
The findings of our dialogue show an ambition among retailers to play their part in reaching the sustainability goals for society in general and their own organization specifically, but also that there is a growing interest among them to work to enable consumers to change their consumption to become more sustainable.This ambition is put into action in several initiatives already in place in the market today.
However, the findings also highlight several barriers related to knowledge, assortment, communication, and internal processes that make it difficult for retailers to translate their sustainability ambitions into actions.Even when retailers have the ambition to help consumers act more sustainably, these barriers make action difficult.Looking specifically at initiatives tailored to help consumers move towards more sustainable consumption, the findings point towards several gaps within retail organizations that might obstruct the work in helping consumers act more sustainably.

The Organizational sustainability ambition-action gap model
In the service literature, there is a long tradition of working with service gaps to better understand how to improve service quality (e.g.Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry 1985;Zeithaml, Berry, and Parasuraman 1988).Based on our findings, we propose a similar logic will be helpful for understanding the barriers in retailer's sustainability work.Our findings point at several sustainability ambition-action gaps within the retail organization, namely: 1) Knowledge gap, 2) Delivery gap, 3) Communication gap, and 4) Standards gap (see Figure 1 for a visual representation).These four distinct gaps are interlinked, and all can be seen as barriers in the organizational work toward enabling more sustainable consumption.
The difficulty in knowing what sustainability is corresponds to a knowledge gap.In this context, a knowledge gap means a lack of understanding what sustainability in a retail setting really is.This lack of knowledge within the organization spans from understanding how to identify what products are more sustainable, to how to measure sustainability, and often leads to sustainability decisions being made on 'feelings' rather than on facts.In part, the gap is due to the complex nature of sustainability and that specific social or environmental aspects can be of unequal importance across actors or not part of the retailer ambition at all (cf.Wakeman et al. 2022).Although very knowledgeable experts on sustainability are working within the organizations, a broader understanding is needed for sustainability work to move forward.This type of knowledge gap is not exclusive to retail organizations but exists also among consumers and society at large, making it even harder for retailers to help consumers act more sustainable.To bridge this gap, more knowledge and knowledge sharing within organizations in terms of sustainability ambitions and priorities are called for, but likely also among consumers and society at large.
Challenges related to building an assortment of sustainable products can be described as a delivery gap.Retailers are currently not able to deliver more sustainable offers to customers due to the supply of alternative products being restricted.Lack of economy of scale for sustainable alternatives leads to them being less likely to enter the assortment.Just as the complexity of sustainability has been discussed as a barrier for forming new working patterns (Le Roux and Pretorius 2016), many practices within the current food system also seem to have this effect.To bridge this gap solutions both within as well as outside the scope of the organization are needed.It requires revising supplier contracts and finding new ways of collaborating with suppliers, making sure that long-term perspectives and shared values related to sustainability are built into the contracts and rewarded by the system put in place (for similar reasoning see Vadakkepatt et al. 2021).For example, collaboration across food actors could help move away from promoting unsustainable loss leaders and towards promoting sustainable products instead.This could also lead to greater exposure of the more sustainable products helping build an economy of scale of these products in the long-term perspective.
The difficulties related to revisiting internal processe correspond to astandards gap.In this context, astandards gap means agap between the sustainability standards the organization has set (i.e.their ambition) and the internal processes developed in the organization to deliver on them (i.e.action).Currently, retailers are sometimes unable to translate their ambition into everyday activities due to lack of organizational processes that1) align KPIs across departments, 2) guide employees in how to handle trade-offs between economic, environmental, and social aspects, and 3) help employees argue for sustainability solutions internally.To bridge this gap, retailers need to reinvent some of their internal processes and KPIs.Promoting sustainable products should not lead to lower performance measures for other departments and vice versa.Revisiting processes that can help employees in handling possible tradeoffs between profitability and tradeoffs are also needed.Here, the bridge between short-term and long-term perspectives seems especially important.Implementing processes that enable employees to be guided by more long-term goals and allowing for asustainability assortment to develop over time before being dropped from the shelves seems especially called for.For example, timelines used in business cases focusing on sustainability initiatives might be adapted to be longer than what is used for other business initiatives.
The barriers related to communicating sustainability messages can be characterized as a communications gap.Our findings show how difficulties in sustainability communication stem from uncertainties about how to communicate this complex issue, partly driven by a required shift in communication style (going from communicating price to communicating other aspects) and risking adding clutter by including too much information, but partly also by insecurities in what you are allowed to communicate based on legal and trade agreement considerations.Thus, this gap has both a communicative and a regulative solution.As suggested by Aksoy et al. (2022)  understanding of what aspects of sustainability are of relevance to consumers as well as when consumers are most likely to be interested in them (which might lead to a lesser risk of being perceived as pointing fingers).In fact, previous research suggests that more sustainability communication is not necessarily better (Gifford 2011) and it is important to determine whether all sustainability actions should be communicated to customers.In terms of regulations, organizational support for outlining what is allowed when comparing products in a sustainability context can lead to more action in the short term.In the long term, however, focus might need to be shifted towards working across organizations and stakeholders to ensure that the regulatory environment is conducive to the shift towards a more sustainable retail food industry.

Overcoming organizational ambition action gaps
Retail organizations can use the sustainability gap model to map out their current sustainability work and prioritize which gaps are most important.The model can also be used as a starting point to further explore barriers and characterize them in terms of whether they are actual or perceived.Perceived gaps might be solved by increasing knowledge, while actual gaps (those gaps that are due to real, objective actual barriers) would demand a more elaborate action plan typically involving changes in how things are done (e.g.changing negotiation practices or processes within the organization or working to promote shifts in legislations).
The sustainability ambition action gap model points to several gaps within the organization.To bridge these gaps, we have focused on internal solutions, but it is also clear that external solutions, where actors work together across organizations and stakeholders, are needed.Joint initiatives such as the engaged scholarship dialogue approach used in the current study can be an important way to propel the development in this regard.

Contributions
This paper contributes by showing several sustainability ambition-actions gaps within retail organizations as well as suggesting practical solutions for overcoming them.The overall contribution lies not only in the identification of a substantial ambition-action gap within retail organizations, but also in the specification of a series of more specific sustainability gaps enabling a more in-depth discussion of viable solutions.Although we used grocery retailing as context of our study, the proposed sustainability gap model should be useful for other retail sectors as well -just as the Carrington et al. (2014) translation model for consumer gaps have proven to be useful for understanding ambition-action gaps among consumers in different contexts.In fact, many of the barriers we show have been found in previous research (e.g.Le Roux and Pretorius 2016; Tjärnemo and Södahl 2015), suggesting that they are shared across time and context and thus that the overall generalizability of the framework should be high.We advance this literature by providing a comprehensive framework that help integrate such findings thus contributing to a more holistic understanding of sustainability work in retailing.
Our hope is that the proposed sustainability gap model will prove useful for researchers, practitioners, and regulators interested in how to move the retail industry towards a more sustainable future by enabling consumers to move to more sustainable consumption.In fact, by employing an engaged scholarship approach (e.g.Haenlein et al. 2022) and engaging food actors in the dialogue, we have already contributed a small step to move the industry in this direction.The dialogue shows not only the motivation and will of various industry actors to collaborate, but it also highlights the collective power of the industry using collaboration to spark action, innovation, and advocacy and hopefully the current paper can inspire more research efforts in this regard.

Limitations and future research
As always, the findings of the current study are limited in scope and timing.Whereas actors in the studied market shared the ambition to change towards a more sustainable food system, ambitions and actions are likely to differ from those of actors in other geographical markets.Moreover, the data was collected during a time when the inflation rate was low.As the inflation rate increases, consumers might become more price sensitive, potentially making the ambition-action gap for consumers and retailers even greater due to the tradeoffs between sustainability and economic aspects being even more apparent.
Another limitation of the paper is its primary focus on within-organizational ambitions and actions.In our engaged scholarship dialogue, focus was mostly on industry-wide collaborations and cross-organizational ambitions and actions, and these might be helpful for changing the system rather than the organization.Our workshops and interviews also revealed that regulations and collaborations across actors are key to propel sustainable action.More research is thus needed on aspects outside the organization and how these can help minimize the sustainability ambition-action gap.
What is more, our focus was primarily on understanding what grocery retail practitioners do to help consumers in their ambition to act more sustainable and what might be standing in the way of such ambitions.Thus, our focus was on barriers and tensions rather than drivers and enablers.Future research is needed to explore how to best bridge these gaps and examine possible drivers and enablers within them.It is our hope that the current paper will contribute to such efforts.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding
The work was supported by the Hakon Swenson Stiftelsen [2019004].

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.The organizational sustainability ambition-action gap model.

Table 1 .
Overview of workshops and interviews used in the study.

Table 2 .
Illustrative list of actions in place on the market today.