Community-Oriented Motivations and Knowledge Sharing as Drivers of Success Within Food Assemblies

Despite the increased level of awareness and concern towards social and environmental issues, many consumers have not yet modified their consumption and lifestyle behaviour. In response to this trend, previous works have shown that social and collective actions among customers, enabled by certain food system networks, have the potential to transform passive consumers into active citizens. The aim of this paper is to analyse if community-oriented motivations and knowledge sharing within a network have a positive effect on customers' consumption in terms of purchase frequency and quantity. To do so we collected data from Italian Food Assemblies, a particular kind of alternative food network based on a digital platform enabling the direct trade between communities and local farmers and producers. The simultaneous coexistence of online and on-site elements characterizing Food Assemblies allowed us to individuate possible differences between knowledge sharing through online and onsite interactions. We developed a quantitative analysis based on a regression model, collecting data from a questionnaire submitted to 8497 Italian food assembly customers, finally receiving 2115 valid answers. The results show that community-oriented motivations and on-site knowledge sharing appear to be statistically significant for purchase frequency, while online knowledge sharing affects both frequency and quantity.