“I want to say one word to you, just one word: plastic. The future of the world is in plastic, think about it.”, says a man to Dustin Hoffman in the movie ‘The Graduate’.
The year was 1967. Plastic had been invented by an Italian, Giulio Natta, who was awarded the 1963 Nobel Prize in Chemistry precisely for his invention of the ‘crystalline polymer.’ In 1967, plastic was beautiful, practical, cheap, indestructible, and not a tree was consumed to produce it. Not only that: plastic was sustainable, it was innovative. Today plastic is a demon: from angel to demon, fifty years have flown by in the blink of an eye.
But what is sustainable today?
This is not the first time we have wondered. Over the past two years, as the fear of ending up drowned or without more water due to global warming was compounded by the anguish of the pandemic and its uncertainty, we sought refuge in new consumption habits and began to reflect on what it means to be sustainable for us. Not already because of the mainstream narrative, which associates the idea of sustainability with meanings that are very precise but in everyday life perceived as unattainable, but because of a narrative for us that is more realistic, peripheral, made up of milder expectations.
Food delivery, in this sense, is one of the new consumption attitudes that we as users have developed in recent years, with the emergence from Covid-19 bringing it to the fore during lockdowns and red zones, at least in Italy. Home food delivery has grown online grocery shopping services (not just convenience foods), putting us in the dual perspective of demanding more and more innovation, more and more digital solutions, but also more sustainable consumption, although we still lack a generalized awareness of what sustainability is.
IZILab, the digital division of IZI, has long been investigating sustainability in its meanings closest to people’s everyday lives: from what you wear and what products you buy, to what fashion is sustainable and how sustainable it really is; to the most sustainable products sold in e-commerce, and now it does so with an analysis on the relationship between food delivery and sustainability on two levels: from a network perspective, what users post on social media about this relationship between sustainability and food delivery, and with a multi-question survey, a customer satisfaction survey, to detect factors of incidence in online food choice.
The research was presented in a webinar, along with the survey partners: the University of Ferrara and Kpi6, with contributions from Glovo, a leading food delivery company.
Thanks to an analysis carried out on two levels, the first being more innovative and based on the collection and processing of data present on social networks and the other, based on the processing of data and information obtained by conducting a traditional survey on as many as fifteen sample cities where we collected the opinion of 1. 500 users, the identikit of the user who uses the food delivery service was identified and profiled, outlining the main characteristics that determine their propensity to consume, frequency and reasons for use, distribution by city and level of satisfaction on the different cities, the means by which the delivery was made and the users’ awareness of the lowest-emission means used for delivery, and the incidence of sustainability as a driver of online order choice.
The research shows a certain interest of users in sustainability in the home food delivery service, becoming one of the determining factors in their consumption choices, at least as a factor along with speed of delivery, courtesy of the staff, and preservation of the delivered product. There also emerges an attitude, on the part of users, to be more flexible on costs in order to have a service that meets their needs. Sustainability in food delivery is, again, a cultural factor that nevertheless urges attention and awareness not only in users but throughout the value chain.
From today we make available in one report, the research:
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